The Mind Spider and Other Stories (2 page)

Serenity Shoals, which has been called a Sandbox for Grownups, was one of Twenty-first Century America’s largest mental hospitals and now it was clearly filled beyond any planned capacity. Here dwelt the garden-variety schizos, manics, paranoids, brain-damageds, a few exotic sufferers from radiation-induced nerve sickness and spaceflight-gendered gravitational dementia and cosmic shock, and a variety of other special cases—but really all of them were simply the people who for one reason or another found it a better or at least more bearable bargain to live with their imaginings rather than even pretend to live with what society called reality.

Tonight Serenity Shoals was restless. There was more noise, more laughter and chatter and weeping, more movement of small lights along the corridors and streets, more shouts and whistles, more unscheduled night-parties and night-wanderings of patients and night-expeditions of aides, more beetle-like scunyings of sand-cars with blinking headlights, more emergencies of all sorts. It may have been the general overcrowding, or the new batch of untrained nurses and aides, or the rumor that lobotomies were being performed again, or the two new snackbars. It may even have been the moonlight—Luna disturbing the “loonies” in the best superstitious tradition.

For that matter, it may have been the eddy in the darkness that was the cause of it all.

Along the landward side of Serenity Shoals, between it and the wasteland bordering Civil Service Knolls, stretched a bright new wire fence, unpleasantly but not lethally electrified—one more evidence that Serenity Shoals was having to cope with more than its quota.

Back and forth along the line of the fence, though a hundred yards above, the eddy in the darkness beat and whirled, disturbing the starlight. There was an impression of hopeless yearning about its behavior, as if it wanted to reach its people but could not pass over the boundary.

From the mangy terrace between the permanent buildings and the nominally temporary tents, Director Andreas Snowden surveyed his schizo-manic domain. He was an elderly man with sleepy eyes and unruly white hair. He frowned, sensing an extra element in the restlessness tonight. Then his brow cleared, and smiling with tender cynicism, he recited to himself:

“Give me ycrur tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teaming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”

Applies a lot more to Serenity Shoals,
he thought,
than to America these days. Though I ain’t no bloody copper goddess bearing a lamp to dazzle the Dagos and I ain’t got no keys to no golden doors.
(Dr. Snowden was always resolutely crude and ungrammatical in his private thoughts, perhaps in reaction to the relative gentility of his spoken utterances. He was also very sentimental.)

“Oh, hello, Doctorl” The woman darting across the comer of the terrace had stopped suddenly. It was hard to see anything about her except that she was thin.

Dr. Snowden walked toward her. “Good evening, Mrs. Wisant,” he said. “Rather late for you to be up and around, isn’t it?”

“I know, Doctor, but the thought-rays are very thick tonight and they sting worse than the mosquitoes. Besides I’m too excited I couldn’t sleep anyhow. My daughter is coming here tomorrow.”

“Is she?” Dr. Snowden asked gently. “Odd that Joel hasn’t mentioned it to me—as it happens, I’m to see your husband tomorrow on a legal matter.”

“Oh, Joel doesn’t know she’s coming,” the lady assured him. “He’d never let her if he did. He doesn’t think I’m good for her ever since I started blacking out on my visits home and . . . doing things. But it isn’t a plot between me and Gabby, either—
she
doesn’t know she’s coming.”

“So? Then how are you going to manage it, Mrs. Wisant?” “Don’t try to sound so normal, Doctor!—especially when you know very well
I’m not.
I suppose
you
think that
I
think I will summon her by sending a thought-ray. Not at all. I’ve

practically given up using thought-rays. They’re not reliable and they carry yellow fever. No, Doctor, I got Gabby to come here tomorrow ten years ago.”

“Now how did you do that, Mrs. Wisant? Time travel?” “Don’t be so patronizing! I merely impressed it on Gabby’s mind ten years ago—after all, I
am
a trained hypnotherapist— that she should come to me when she became a princess. Now Joel writes me she’s been chosen Tranquility Princess for the festival tomorrow. You see?”

“Very interesting. But don’t be disappointed if—”

“Stop being a wet blanket, Doctor! Don’t you have any trust in psychological techniques? I
know
she’s coming. Oh the daisies, the beautiful daisies . .

“Then that settles it. How are they treating you here these days?”

“I have no complaints, Doctor—except I must say I don’t like all these new nurses and aides. They’re callow. They seem to think it’s very queer of us to be crazy.”

Dr. Snowden chuckled. “Some people are narrow-minded," he agreed.

“Yes, and so gullible, Doctor. Just this afternoon two of the new nurses were goggling over a magazine ad about how people should improve their personalities by becoming monsters. I ask you!”

Dr. Snowden shrugged. “I doubt whether all of us are monster material. And now perhaps you’d better . . .”

“I suppose so. Good night, Doctor.”

As she was turning to go, Mrs. Wisant paused to slap her left forearm viciously.

“Thought-ray?” Dr. Snowden asked.

Mrs. Wisant looked at him sardonically. “No,” she said. "Mosquito!”

Dull security and the dead weight of perfection 
breed aberration even more surely than disorder and fear.

—the notebooks of A.S.

Gabrielle Wisant, commonly called Gabby though she was anything but that, was sleeping on her back in long pink pajamas, stretched out very straight and with her arms folded across her breasts, looking more like the stone funeral effigy of a girl than a living one—an effect which the unrumpled bedclothes heightened.

The unocculted windoor let in the first cold granular light of dawn. The room was feminine, but without any special character—it seemed secretive. It had one item in common with her father’s: on a low bedside stand and next to a pad of pink notepaper was another sliced-off back cover of the Individuality Unlimited bulletin. Close beside the "David Cruxon: Your Monster Mentor” photo there was a note scrawled in green ink.

Gabs— How’s this for lacks? Cruxon’s Camyl or corny? Lunch with your MM same place but 130 pip emma. Big legal morning. Tell you then, Dave.

(Sign and Sealed in the Monsterarium, 4 pip emma, 15 June)

The page was bowed up as if something about ten inches long were lying under it.

Gabrielle Wisant’s eyes opened, though not another muscle of her moved, and they stayed that way, directed at the ceiling.

And then . . . then nothing overt happened, but it was as if the mind of Gabrielle Wisant—or the soul or spirit, call it what you will—rose from unimaginable depths to the surface of her eyes to take a long look around, like a small furtive animal that silently mounts to the mouth of its burrow to sniff the weather, ready to duck back at the slightest sudden noise or apprehension of danger—in fact, rather like the ground-hog come up to see or not to see its shadow on Candlemas Day.

With a faculty profounder than physical sight, the mind of Gabby Wisant took a long questioning look around at her world—the world of a “pretty, sweet-minded girl of 17”—to decide if it were worth living in.

Sniffing the weather of America, she became aware of a country of suntanned, slimmed-down people with smooth-ed-out minds, who fed contentedly on decontaminated news and ads and inspiration pieces, like hamsters on a laboratory diet.
But what were they after? What did they do for kicks? What happened to the ones whose minds wouldn’t smooth, or smoothed too utterly?

She saw the sane, civilized, secure, superior community of Civil Service Knolls, a homestead without screeching traffic or violence, without jukeboxes or juvenile delinquency, a place of sensible adults and proper children, a place so tranquil it was going to have a Tranquility Festival tonight.
But just beyond it she saw Serenity Shoals with its lost thousands living in brighter darker worlds, including one who had planted posthypnotic suggestions in children’s minds like time-bombs.

She saw a father so sane, so just, so strong, so perfectly controlled, so always right that he was not so much a man as a living statue—the statue she too tried to be every night while she slept.
And what was the statue really like under the marble? What were the heat and color of its blood?

She saw a witty man named David Cruxon who perhaps loved her, but who was so mixed up between his cynicism and his idealism that you might say he cancelled out. A knight without armor ... and armor without a knight.

She saw no conventional monsters, no eddies in darkness— her mind had been hiding deep down below all night.

She saw the surface of her own mind, so sweetly smoothed by a succession of kindly hypnotherapists (and one beloved traitor who must not be named) that it was positively frightening, like a book of horrors bound in pink velvet with silk rosebuds, or the sluggish sea before a hurricane or night softly silent before a scream. She wished she had the kind of glass-bottomed boat that would let her peer below, but that was the thing above all else she must not do.

She saw herself as Tranquility Princess some twelve hours hence, receiving the muted ovation under the arching trees, candlelight twinkling back from her flared and sequinned skirt and just one leaf drifted down and caught in her finespun hair.

Princess . . . Princess ... As if that word were somehow a signal, the mind of Gabby Wisant made its decision about the worth of the upper world and dove back inside, dove deep deep down. The ground-hog saw its shadow black as ink and decided to dodge the dirty weather ahead.

The
thing
that instantly took control of Gabby Wisant’s body when her mind went into hiding treated that body with a savage familiarity, certainly not as if it were a statue. It sprang to its haunches in the center of the bed, snuffing the air loudly. It ripped off the pink pajamas with a complete impatience or ignorance of magnetic clasps. It switched on the lights and occulted the windoor, making it a mirror, and leered approvingly at itself and ran its hands over its torso in fierce caresses. It snatched a knife with a six-inch blade from under the bulletin cover and tried its edge on its thumb and smiled at the blood it drew and sucked it. Then it went through the inner door, utterly silent as to footsteps but breathing in loud, measured gasps like a careless tiger.

When Judistrator Wisant woke, his daughter was squatted beside him on the permanently undisturbed half of his bed, crooning to his scoutmaster's knife. She wasn’t looking at him quite, or else she was looking at him sideways—he couldn’t tell through the eyelash-blur of his slitted eyes.

He didn’t mova He wasn’t at all sure he could. He humped the back of his tongue to say “Gabby,” but he knew it would come out as a croak and he wasn’t even sure he could manage that. He listened to his daughter—the crooning had changed back to faintly gargBag tiger-gasps—and he felt the cold sweat trickling down the sides of his face and over his naked scalp and stingiflgly into his eyes.

Suddenly his daughter lifted the knife high above her head, both hands locked around the hilt, and drove it down into the center of the empty, perfectly mounded pillow beside him. As it thudded home he realized with faint surprise that he hadn’t moved although he’d tried to. It was as though he had contracted his muscles convulsively, but discovered that all the tendons had been cut without his knowing.

He lay there quite flaccid, watching his daughter through barely parted eyelids as she mutilated the pillow with slow savage slashes, digging in the point with a twist, and sawing off a comer. She must be sweating too—strands of her finespun pale gold hair clung wetly to her neck and slim shoulders. She was crooning once more, with a rippling low laugh and a soft growl for variety, and she was drooling a little. The hospital smell of the fresh-cut plastic came to him faintly.

Young male voices were singing in the distance. Judistrator Wisant’s daughter seemed to hear them as soon as he did, for she stopped chopping at the pillow and held still, and then she started to sway her head and she smiled and she got off the bed with long easy movements and went to the windoor and thumbed it wide open and stood on the balcony, the knife trailing laxly from her left hand.

The singing was louder now—young male voices rather dutifully joyous in a slow marching rhythm—and now he recognized the tune. It was “America the Beautiful” but the words were different. This verse began,

“Oh beautiful for peaceful minds.

Secure families
..

It occurred to Wisant that it must be the youths going out at dawn to gather the boughs and deck the Great Bower, a traditional preparatory step to the Twilight Tranquility Festival. He’d have deduced it instandy if his tendons hadn’t been cut...

But then he found that he had turned his head toward the balcony and even turned his shoulders and lifted up on one elbow a little and opened his eyes wide.

His daughter put her knife between her teeth and clambered sure-footedly onto the railing and jumped to the nearest sycamore branch and hung there swinging, like a golden-haired, long-legged, naked ape.

“And bring with thee

Tranquility

To Civil Service Knolls

She swung in along the branch to the trunk and laid her knife in a crotch and braced one foot there and started to swing the other and her free arm too in monkey circles.

He reached out and tried to thumb the phone button, but his hand was shaking in a four-inch arc.

He heard his daughter yell, “Yoohool Yoohoo, boys!"

The singing stopped.

Judistrator Wisant half scrabbled, half rolled out of bed and hurried shakingly—and he hoped noiselessly—through the door and down the hall and into his daughter’s bedroom, shut the door behind him—and locked it, as he only discovered later—and grabbed her phone and punched out Securitor Harker’s number.