The Toynbee Convector (3 page)

There was a long silence as the woman across town found her own breath.

“It’s silly, I couldn’t sleep. I had this hunch—”

“Emma—”

“No, let me finish. All of a sudden I thought, Clara’s not well, or Clara’s hurt, or—”

Clara Feck sank to the edge of the bed, the weight of Emma’s voice pulling her down. Eyes shut, she nodded. “Clara,” said Emma, a thousand miles off, “you—all
right
?”

“All right,” said Clara, at last.

“Not sick? House ain’t on fire?”

“No, no. No.”

“Thank God. Silly me. Forgive?”

“Forgiven.”

“Well, then ... good night.”

And Emma Crowley hung up.

Clara Peck sat looking at the receiver for a full minute, listening to the signal that said that someone had gone away, and then at last placed the phone blindly back in its cradle.

She went back out to look up at the trapdoor.

It was quiet Only a pattern of leaves, from the window, flickered and tossed on its wooden frame.

Clara bunked at the trapdoor.

“Think you’re
smart
, don’t you?” she said.

There were no more prowls, dances, murmurs, or mouse-pavanes for the rest of that night.

The sounds returned, three nights later, and they were—larger.

“Not mice” said Clara Peck. “Good-sized
rats
. Eh?”

In answer, the ceiling above executed an intricate, crosscurrenting ballet, without music. This toe dancing, of a most peculiar sort, continued until the moon sank. Then, as soon as the light failed, the house grew silent and only Clara Peck took up breathing and life, again.

By the end of the week, the patterns were more geometrical. The sounds echoed in every upstairs room; the sewing room, the old bedroom, and in the library where some former occupant had once turned pages and gazed over a sea of chestnut trees.

On the tenth night, all eyes and no face, with the sounds coming in drumbeats and weird syncopations, at three in the morning, Clara Peck flung her sweaty hand at the telephone to dial Emma Crowley:

“Clara! I
knew
you’d call!”

“Emma, it’s three am. Aren’t you surprised?”
“No, I been lying here thinking of you. I wanted to call, but felt a fool. Something is wrong, yes?”

“Emma, answer me this. If a house has an empty attic for years, and all of a sudden has an attic full of things,
how come
?”

“I didn’t know you
had
an attic—”

“Who
did
? Listen, what started as mice then sounded like rats and now sounds like cats running around up there. What’ll I do?”

“The telephone number of the Ratzaway Pest Team on Main Street is—wait. Here, MAIN seven-seven-nine-nine. You
sure
something’s in your attic?”

“The whole damned high school track team.”

“Who used to live in your house, Clara?”

“Who—?”

“I mean, it’s been clean all this time, right, and now, well,
infested
. Anyone ever die there?”

“Die?”

“Sure, if someone died there, maybe you haven’t got mice, at all.”

“You trying to tell me—ghosts?”

“Don’t you believe—?”

“Ghosts, or so-called friends who try spooking me with them. Don’t call again, Emma!”

“But,
you
called
me
!”

“Hang up, Emma!!”

Emma Crowley hung up. In the hall at three fifteen in the cold morning, Clara Peck glided out, stood for a moment, then pointed up at the ceiling, as if to provoke it.

“Ghosts?” she whispered.

The trapdoor’s hinges, lost in the night above, oiled themselves with wind. Clara Peck turned slowly and went back, and thinking about every movement, got into bed. She woke at four twenty in the morning because a

wind shook the house. Out in the hall, could it be? She strained. She tuned her ears.

Very softly, very quietly, the trapdoor in the stairwell ceiling squealed.

And opened wide.

Can’t
be! she thought.

The door fell up, in, and down, with a thud.

Is!
she thought.

I’ll go make sure, she thought

No!

She jumped, ran, locked the door, leaped back in bed. “Hello, Ratzaway!” she heard herself call, muffled, under the covers.

Going downstairs, sleepless, at six in the morning, she kept her eyes straight ahead, so as not to see that dreadful ceiling.

Halfway down she glanced back, started, and laughed.

“Silly!” she cried.

For the trapdoor was not open at all.

It was shut

“Ratzaway?” she said, into the telephone receiver, at seven thirty on a bright morning.

It was noon when the Ratzaway inspection truck stopped in front of Clara Peck’s house.

In the way that Mr. Timmons, the young inspector, strolled with insolent disdain up the walk, Clara saw that he knew everything in the world about mice, termites, old maids, and odd late-night sounds. Moving, he glanced around at the world with that fine masculine hauteur of the bullfighter midring or the skydiver fresh from the sky, or the womanizer lighting his cigarette, back turned to the poor creature in the bed behind him. As he pressed her doorbell, he was God’s messenger. When Clara opened the door she almost slammed it for the way his eyes peeled away her dress, her flesh, her thoughts. His smile was the alcoholic’s smile. He was drunk on himself. There was only one thing to do:

“Don’t just stand there!” she shouted. “Make yourself useful!” She spun around and marched away from his shocked face.

She glanced back to see if it had had the right effect. Very few women had ever talked this way to him. He was studying the door. Then, curious, he stepped in.

“This way!” said Clara.

She paraded through the hall, up the steps to the landing, where she had placed a metal stepladder. She thrust her hand up, pointing.

“There’s the attic. See if you can make sense out of the damned noises up there. And don’t overcharge me when you’re done. Wipe your feet when you come down. I got to go shopping. Can I trust you not to steal me blind while I’m gone?”

With each blow, she could see him veer off balance. His face flushed. His eyes shone. Before he could speak, she marched back down the steps to shrug on a light coat.

“Do you know what mice sound like in attics?” she said, over her shoulder.

“I damn well do, lady,” he said.

“Clean up your language. You know rats? These could be rats or bigger. What’s bigger in an attic?”

“You got any raccoons around here?” he said.

“How’d they get
in
?”

“Don’t you know your own house, lady? I—”

But here they both stopped. For a sound had come from above. It was a small itch of a sound at first. Then it scratched. Then it gave a thump like a heart.

Something moved in the attic.

Timmons blinked up at the shut trapdoor and snorted.

“Hey!”

Clara Peck nodded, satisfied, pulled on her gloves, adjusted her hat, watching.

“It sounds like—” drawled Mr. Timmons.

“Yes?”

“Did a sea captain ever live in this house?” he asked, at last.

The sound came again, louder. The whole house seemed to drift and whine with the weight which was shifted above.

“Sounds like cargo.” Timmons shut his eyes to listen.

“Cargo on a ship, sliding when the ship changes course.”

He broke into a laugh and opened his eyes.

“Good God,” said Clara, and tried to imagine that.

“On the other hand,” said Mr. Timmons, half-smiling up at that ceiling, “you got a greenhouse up there, or something? Sounds like plants growing. Or a yeast, may be, big as a doghouse, getting out of hand. I heard of a man once, raised yeast in his cellar. It—”

The front screen door slammed.

Clara Feck, outside glaring in at his jokes, said:

“I’ll be back in an hour. Jump!”

She heard his laughter follow her down the walk as she marched. She hesitated only once to look back.

The damn fool was standing at the foot of the ladder, looking up. Then he shrugged, gave a what-the-hell gesture with his hands, and—

Scrambled up the stepladder like a sailor.

When Clara Feck marched back an hour later, the Ratzaway truck still stood silent at the curb. “Hell,” she said to it. “Thought he’d be done by now. Strange man tramping around, swearing—”

She stopped and listened to the house.

Silence.

“Odd,” she muttered.

“Mr. Timmons!?” she called.

And realizing she was still twenty feet from the open front door, she approached to call through the screen.

“Anyone
home
?”

She stepped through the door into a silence like the silence in the old days before the mice had begun to change to rats and the rats had danced themselves into something larger and darker on the upper attic decks. It was a silence that, if you breathed it in, smothered you.

She swayed at the bottom of the flight of stairs, gazing up, her groceries hugged like a dead child in her arms.

“Mr. Timmons—?”

But the entire house was still.

The portable ladder still stood waiting on the landing.

But the trapdoor was shut.

Well, he’s
obviously
not up in there! she thought. He wouldn’t climb and shut himself in. Damn fool’s just gone away.

She turned to squint out at his truck abandoned in the bright noon’s glare.

Truck’s broke down, I imagine. He’s gone for help.

She dumped her groceries in the kitchen and for the first time in years, not knowing why, lit a cigarette, smoked it, lit another, and made a loud lunch, banging skillets and running the can opener overtime.

The house listened to all this, and made no response.

By two o’clock the silence hung about her like a cloud of floor polish. “Ratzaway,” she said, as she dialed the phone. The Pest Team owner arrived half an hour later, by motorcycle, to pick up the abandoned truck. Tipping his cap, he stepped in through the screen door to chat with Clara Feck and look at the empty rooms and weigh the silence.

“No sweat, ma’am,” he said, at last. “Charlie’s been on a few benders, lately. He’ll show up to be fired, tomorrow. What was he
doing
here?”

With this, he glanced up the stairs at the stepladder.

“Oh,” said Clara Peck, quickly, “he was just looking at—everything.”

“I’ll come, myself, tomorrow,” said the owner. And as he drove away into the afternoon, Clara Peck slowly moved up the stairs to lift her face toward the ceiling and watch the trapdoor.

“He didn’t see you, either,” she whispered.

Not a beam stirred, not a mouse danced, in the attic.

She stood like a statue, feeling the sunlight shift and lean through the front door. Why? she wondered. Why did I lie? Well, for one thing, the trapdoor’s shut, isn’t it? And, I don’t know why, she thought, but I won’t want anyone going up that ladder, ever again. Isn’t that silly? Isn’t that strange?

She ate dinner early, listening.

She washed the dishes, alert.

She put herself to bed at ten o’clock, but in the old downstairs maid’s room, for long years unused. Why she chose to lie in this downstairs room, she did not know, she simply did it, and lay there with aching ears, and the pulse moving in her neck and in her brow.

Rigid as a tomb carving under the sheet, she waited.

Around midnight, a wind passed, shook a pattern of leaves on her counterpane. Her eyes flicked wide.

The beams of the house trembled.

She lifted her head.

Something whispered ever so softly in the attic.

She sat up.

The sound grew louder, heavier, like a large but shapeless animal, prowling the attic dark.

She placed her feet on the floor and sat looking at them. The noise came again, for up, a scramble like rabbits’ feet here, a thump Wee a large heart there.

She stepped out into the downstairs hall and stood bathed in a moonlight that was like a pure cool dawn filling the windows.

Holding the banister, she moved stealthily up the stairs. Reaching the landing, she touched the stepladder, then raised her eyes.

She blinked. Her heart jumped, then held still.

For as she watched, very slowly the trapdoor above her sank away. It opened, to show her a waiting square of darkness like a mine shaft going up, without end.

“I’ve had just about
enough
!” she cried. She rushed down to the kitchen and came storming back up with hammer and nails, to climb the ladder in furious leaps.

“I don’t believe any of dust” she cried. “No more, do you hear?
Stop
!”

At the top of the ladder she had to stretch up into the attic, into the solid darkness with one hand and arm. Which meant that her head had to poke halfway through.

“
Now
!” she said. At that very instant, as her head shoved through and her fingers fumbled to find the trapdoor, a most startling, swift thing occurred. As if something had seized her head, as if she were a cork pulled from a bottle, her entire body, her arms, her straight-down legs, were yanked up into the attic.

She vanished like a magician’s handkerchief. Like a marionette whose strings are grabbed by an unseen force, she whistled up.

So swift was the motion that her bedroom slippers were left standing on the stepladder rungs. After that, there was no gasp, no scream. Just a long breathing silence for about ten seconds. Then, for no seen reason, the trapdoor slammed flat down shut.

Because of the quality of silence in the old house, the trapdoor was not noticed again . . . .

Until the new tenants had been in the house for about ten years.

On the Orient, North

It was on the Orient Express heading north from Venice to Paris to Calais that the old woman noticed the ghastly passenger.

He was a traveler obviously dying of some dread disease.

He occupied compartment 22 on the third car back, and had his meals sent in and only at twilight did he rouse to come sit in the dining car surrounded by the false electric lights and the sound of crystal and women’s laughter.