Final Reckonings (32 page)

As Harris, he slept, and awoke in the morning to find the girl gone. Then he followed Harris through the streets, followed him in his search for the girl who had become to him the symbol of salvation. He must find her now or go mad forever. And he searched and he searched, and his panic grew, and he knew that he was on the borderline, on the ragged edge, and he couldn't endure it without her. And he tried to think back to last night and couldn't, and the hatred came welling up in him again, and he went back to his room, and then he sensed her presence there.

The mere thought of her presence was enough to save him; he realized now, for the first time, how close he had come to the brink last night when he'd met her. It had only been a matter of hours, or perhaps even minutes, before he would have cracked, if he hadn't found her. No wonder he'd blacked out there at the last as they made love.

But now her presence was strong, she was with him, somehow, and he knew she would be with him always. He'd done something—he couldn't remember what it was, just now — to ensure that. He'd done something to save himself by keeping her with him forever.

Harris couldn't remember. Not until he decided to go out, and went to the closet and opened the door, and found her propped stiffly in the corner with his knife in her throat. . . .

Then Harris went mad, phosphorescently mad, and Codd got out of him quickly, got out of the phosphorescence and ripped off the helmet.

He sat there panting in the dark for a long moment before he was able to stand up, switch on the light, and walk over to the typewriter.

That night he wrote
The Ragged Edge
in one sitting.

5

During the next three months Barnaby Codd wrote nine short stories and two novelettes. Both of the novelettes and the last six stories sold to the slicks, and Codd acquired a bright, brisk agent named Freeman who negotiated a motion picture sale for one of the novelettes and sold TV rights to three of the stories. He kept urging Codd to tackle a novel now, and talked about "deals" and "percentages" and "building up a name while things are hot."

Things were hot, all right. Too hot. Codd had new furniture and a new car. He had a bank balance of over seven thousand dollars. He was in a position to satisfy his gregarious instincts and aggrandize his ego. There was no need to wait for a phone call from the Hank Olcotts of this world — he could give his own parties whenever he chose.

He tried it, once. The party was not a success. Oh, Hank came and the rest of the crowd came, and they seemed to have a good time. They complimented him and joined with Freeman in marveling over his sudden, unprecedented success. But Codd didn't enjoy himself. He kept waiting for a scarlet poppy to blossom in the corner — and, of course, it didn't.

Then he tried to drink, and found he hadn't the taste for it any longer. Nor the energy. The party tired him. He was glad when they all went away, finally, and he could turn out the lights and put on the helmet.

Because when he put on the helmet, she came. She always came, and always in the same way. He'd find himself back on the green planet under the three green moons. An instant of waiting, and then she'd bound across the landscape on an animal. Each time the animal was different — a lion, tiger, stallion, boar. Each time the action was the same — the creature bounded, she waved, then disappeared. And he'd be off in a dream plot. The plots inevitably were a product of some previous reality; twisted, inverted, expanded and projected.
The Ragged Edge
had been the result of his own search for Cleo. Other plots had been remotely based on subsequent daily incidents in his life.

Tonight, his dream concerned a party — a charity ball. Cleo was there (odd, she seemed to turn up in disguise as a character, regularly), and this time she was a brunette. A reigning movie queen, internationally famous, a symbol of scandal and sophistication.

There was a raffle, and she danced with the holders of the winning tickets. Codd knew the winners — he
became
the winners, each in turn. And he followed their lives.

He was Homer Johnson, meek little bespectacled Homer Johnson, the bookkeeper with the nagging wife. And as a result of his moment of glory, his dance with a dream, he found the courage to leave his wife, tell off his boss, and go on to his romantically cherished ambition of life in the merchant marine. The dance made him a hero.

He was young Derek; Derek, the fortunate. Blond, handsome rich man's son, with an assured future and a girl who worshipped him. But he danced with a dream and thereafter the girl meant nothing to him, and no woman was good enough. He went down, down, to an inevitable end. The dance destroyed him.

He was Geoffrey Farr, a once-great name on the legitimate stage and now an extra voice, a bit character actor in soap operas. He'd wangled his invitation, taken his last five dollars to buy a raffle ticket because he couldn't afford to be shamed in front of the "public." And he'd won a dance, too — won it in his rented tuxedo, danced with splitting seams, danced with a tearing pain in his chest — because he was old, too old for the constant strain of "keeping up appearances" and too old for the excitement.

The star had been nice to him when they danced, and some
Life
photographer had remembered his name and taken a shot on the off-chance that this was a good "human interest angle" to play up. And the ballroom buzzed.

Before the night was over, Geoffrey Farr had been "rediscovered" by two agents, a producer casting a Broadway show and the star's personal director. There would be contracts in the morning, and Geoffrey Farr would be back on top again.

Before the night was over, Geoffrey Farr died of a heart attack, brought on by the strain and the excitement. He had danced with a dream, and the dream was death.

Codd died, took off the helmet, and began to set down the complete outline of T
HE
D
ANCERS
. It was going to be quite a novel — some of the touches were pure corn, he realized, but the kind of corn that sells. The kind that logically lends itself to rental library circulation, to mass motion picture audience appeal. "A" corn. He had the angle now. A sort of combination of G
RAND
H
OTEL
and L
ETTER TO
T
HREE
W
IVES
.

He could write it in a month, he knew that.

And he did.

Freeman was enthusiastic when he saw the finished manuscript. "This is it!" he kept crowing. "I knew you'd do it, Barnaby. You've been getting farther and farther away from all that morbid fantasy stuff. Now you've got the commercial angle. I'm going to get busy on this tomorrow. Don't worry about a thing. I'd suggest you go home and take a good long rest. You look tired, man. This job must have knocked you out."

Codd drove home. The new car handled perfectly, but driving was an effort. Everything had been an effort during the past month. He hadn't worn the helmet while writing, but the effects were there. Aside from work, he moved in a daze. Action and reaction were oddly altered. Of course, that often happened when he was working on a story — the story became more real than the external world. But even the story hadn't seemed real.

The dreams were real.

That was the way he'd felt. The dreams were real. The rest was ephemeral, unimportant. Only the dream world existed. Cleo had been the bait to get him to wear the helmet. The stories and the success were the bait that kept him wearing the helmet. Somebody or something wanted him to do that, and it was real.

Codd went up to the apartment. He realized that he was in a bad state and realized — sensibly enough — that he was letting his mind run away. Freeman was right; he was just tired from overwork.

Well, he didn't have to work that hard any more. Somehow he knew he had a winner; Freeman confirmed it. He'd sell the novel, get a decent motion picture sale, and take things easy. After all, he was a writer in his own right — he didn't have to depend on the helmet. The whole thing was beginning to prey on his mind — guilty secrets, and all that sort of rot. From now on it might be a good idea to forget about everything that had gone before.

Cleo, whoever she was, had disappeared. Nobody knew about the helmet. Nobody had come to blackmail him or accuse him or threaten him. Why not call the whole thing off and start all over, start fresh, as his own man?

His own man. . . .

Barnaby Codd stood in front of the mirror and took inventory of himself.

The Brooks Brothers suit was immaculate. The Sulka tie had a certain subdued resplendence. But the long, lean face was thin, the cheeks were sunken, the brown hair was lusterless, the skin was waxy pale, and the glazed eyes held the glitter of horrified recognition.

Nothing had changed. He was still a walking corpse.

And if he could still walk, it was time for the headshrinker.

6

It was very comfortable on the leather couch.

Sometimes it's nice to be a corpse, to be laid out in state with hands folded peacefully over the chest, eyes open and unseeing, ready for eternal rest.

When you accept death, nothing else matters any more, and it's easier to talk. So much, much easier.

Barnaby Codd told Doctor Fine all about this feeling. It was not difficult to talk to the quiet little psychoanalyst. Olcott had recommended him, seemed to think it was a good idea. And it was a good idea, so far.

Fine was willing to dispense with all the preliminaries, to take Codd's word for it that he understood his problem. And with that encouragement, Codd talked.

He'd been talking now for almost an hour. He told the whole story — about the writing, and meeting Cleo Fane, and the curious aftermath to that evening. He told about the helmet and the dreams. He held nothing back.

Doctor Fine listened attentively, patiently. Codd felt a growing conviction that he could be helped here, that Doctor Fine knew the answers.

He concluded on a hopeful note. "What do you think? What does it all mean to you, Doctor?"

Codd sat up and fished for a cigarette. Little Doctor Fine sat back and smiled. "It doesn't matter, really, what it means to me. The important question is — what does it mean to you? How would you explain it?"

"I — I can't explain it."

'Then make a guess."

"Are you serious?"

"Naturally. Are you? Then make a guess."

"Well." Codd lit the cigarette and sought significant symbolism in a spiral of smoke. "One theory would be that when I went to the party, I was already cracking up. Alcohol worked upon me autosuggestively." He paused.

"Go on. This is interesting."

"I remember that Olcott never saw this woman. His friends don't seem to know her. So perhaps there was no woman. Perhaps I imagined the whole thing—manufactured a stimulus, an excuse to continue writing. You might say that I hypnotized myself."

The Doctor nodded. "Its theoretically possible," he conceded.

"Except for one thing." Codd stood up, walked over to the coatrack, fished in the pocket of his overcoat. "She gave me the helmet. Here it is."

He extended the curious metallic headpiece, and Doctor Fine inspected it carefully.

"You couldn't make it yourself," he mused. "I don't suppose — "

"I don't suppose, either," Codd answered. "Supposition won't help me. And I suspect that no laboratory on earth could accurately analyze the component structure of a magic helmet. She warned me against trying to find out — I'm wondering now whether or not it might be a good idea to at least make the attempt. At least it could help convince me of my own sanity."

Doctor Fine gazed at the antennae, at the coils, at the odd patina of the silver. "If you'll permit me, I'd be glad to have it examined for you," he said. "But before you resign yourself to believing in the power of the helmet, why not think this thing through a little farther?"

Codd finished his cigarette, crushed it out. "All right. Let's take the other tack. Cleo Fane exists. I did see her. She did give me this helmet, for her own mysterious purposes. And the helmet — "

"Ignore the helmet," Doctor Fine suggested. "Suppose the helmet was, and is, just a costume piece. What then?"

"But I had the dreams," Codd objected. "I had the first dream there in her apartment. And when I woke up, she was still there, with the emerald. She seemed to be in the dream and to know all about it — "

"Think!" insisted Doctor Fine. "What could that mean?"

"It could mean — it could mean that I didn't hypnotize myself—that I did dream — but that
she
hypnotized me. Darkness and quiet and fatigue and alcohol and suggestion. She made me believe that I'd dream when I put the helmet on. And then she used the emerald as a focal point. No wonder she knew my dream — she was planting it in my mind, telling me what I was dreaming all the time!"

Doctor Fine purred like a plump little cat. The canary had gone down nicely, it seemed. But —

"Wait!" exclaimed Codd. "That wouldn't work, either. Because I dreamed again. And again. Whenever I wore the helmet, I had a dream. She wasn't present to suggest anything, not once. And so — "

"Did you ever hear of post-hypnotic suggestion?" asked the Doctor.

"I get it! She did it all at the one sitting — told me that from that time on, whenever I wore the helmet, I'd dream. Perhaps planted the whole series in my subconscious. From that time on the helmet itself was the focal agent for hypnosis. And it's still working!"

From the sound of the deep purr, the Doctor had found another canary.

"Two more questions, Doctor. It's clearer to me now, and I feel better once I realize there are other explanations than crazy, supernatural ones. But two questions have to be answered. The first is — "

"Why should anyone attempt such a thing?" Doctor Fine was creeping up on his third canary, and he couldn't wait. "Because, unfortunately, you are not alone in the need for analytical therapy, my friend. The world is full of disorganized personalities. Your Cleo Fane, with her calculated air of mystery, her fabricated helmet and fabricated story, may well be acting compulsively and dramatizing her own private fantasies of power. She was looking for a creative artist,' she told you. An instrument of masculinity, perhaps, a surrogate for—"