Time Travel Omnibus, page 297
I downed the second pick-me-up, disregarded the newspaper, and went into the kitchen. There were more things puzzling me around that house than the chair. Gwen smiled brightly at me as I came into the kitchen.
“FEELING better, dear?”
“A little,” I said. Then I got immediately to the point. “Look, Gwen. There’s something I want to know.”
“Yes, dear?”
“What’s up?” I demanded.
Gwen frowned prettily in bewilderment. “What do you mean, dear?”
“I mean what’s up. I got drunk last night. I said a number of things at the time which—incidentally—I still don’t regret. You were furious. Your mother was sweetly boiling. I wake up this morning after a furious bender and find you and your mother dripping with kindly solicitude toward me. What’s the idea?”
Gwen smiled and came over to me. She put her arm around my waist and her head against my chest.
“I told you, Tom,” she said. “We’re starting everything with a clean slate. Mother and I both agreed that we should not try to boss you the way we might have done occasionally in the past.”
I still didn’t get it.
“But you were all set to walk out on me,” I protested.
Gwen nodded. “Hasty words, spoken in anger, Tom. I’m sorry. My mother made me realize what a terrible thing that would be.”
And then, all of a sudden, it was quite clear. Her mother. Why, it should have been immediately apparent. If Gwen had walked out that would have meant that her mother would be packing, too. And the old girl was far too smart to kick over a nice soft berth in my house just because her daughter had a mad on. Ahhhhh—very clever. Exceedingly clever!
All of a sudden it occurred to me what a sap I’d been these ten years. Here I’d been letting two women dominate my entire existence, my wife and her mother, for all of a decade just because I hadn’t been smart enough to put my foot down sooner. I’d called the old girl’s bluff, and she knew it. And from now on in, things would be decidedly different.
“Mother will leave if you don’t go right upstairs and apologize,” had been one of Gwen’s stock phrases on at least a hundred occasions in our ten years of marriage. And on each occasion, I had gone upstairs to mumble apologies to the old witch.
“Mother is packing. She won’t stay another instant, unless you say you’re sorry.” That had been another of Gwen’s favorites. And I had always rushed up to stop the old girl from packing and to tell her I was sorry.
But the ironic truth of the matter was actually that Gwen’s mother couldn’t have been pried loose from my house with a steam-driven block and tackle!
Suddenly I grinned. Even my hangover seemed to fade into a role of minor importance.
“That’s fine, honey,” I said. “That’s swell. I think I’ll go upstairs and bring down a few of my things from the attic. Incidentally, I think the new antique chair would look swell in the living room corner by the fireplace.”
Gwen nodded, and I could see it wasn’t easy for her to do.
“Certainly, Tom, but don’t try to fit them all into the living room. We just haven’t space for everything.”
“Just a few odds and ends,” I assured her. Gwen looked at me dubiously, but forced a smile of agreement. I walked out of the kitchen on clouds.
The enemy was routed and fleeing in all directions. It took ten years before I accidentally stumbled on the formula for victory. But now the battle was mine, and my triumph knew no bounds. Everything was wonderful—I thought . . .
BY mid-afternoon the house looked just the way I had always wanted it to. At least ten of my favorite antiques had been added to both the dining-room and living-room scene. My recently acquired Roman shields hung proudly over the buffet, and my newly purchased chair stood in the corner of the living-room by the fireplace.
Gwen had watched my busy rearranging with a tight smile and no comments. And even her mother, who popped out of her room now and then to see what was going on, made sweetly hypocritical comments on how nice everything was looking.
I was oh-so-busy, and oh-so-triumphant. Which was the reason for my not being aware of what was going on in the kitchen until about four o’clock.
Gwen and her mother had been out there for perhaps an hour, fussing around with the dinner, when I happened to wander out in search of a hammer. I walked in to find the kitchen groaning with festive dinner delicacies, and almost all our best dinnerware spread around in preparation for the table.
“Well, well,” I observed smugly, “some feast for tonight, eh?”
Gwen nodded, exchanging a conspiratorial glance with her mother.
“Oh, yes, Tom. It will be quite an occasion. Mother hasn’t seen Alice in all of ten years.”
I was munching an olive, and almost swallowed the pit.
“Alice?” I bleated. “Who’s Alice?”
Gwen’s mother gave me a sweet smile. “An old school-girl chum of mine, Thomas. We were such great friends for the longest time, and I just got the letter from her yesterday.”
“Letter?” I wasn’t getting any of this.
Gwen nodded. “Mother’s friend is passing through town. We invited her out here.”
“Oh,” I said, “for dinner, eh?”
Gwen smiled sweetly. “You didn’t have anything planned for tonight, did you, Tom?”
Her mother broke in with her act of sweet resignation.
“If you don’t want her here, Thomas, I can tell her—”
I cut her off with a triumphant wave of the hand. Hell, I could afford to be magnanimous.
“Not at all,” I said. “Glad to have her. When’s she arriving? On what train?”
“The five o’clock,” Gwen’s mother said. “I told her how to reach us by the trolley bus.” Her smile was sad. “Even though it will be hard for her to have that walk from the bus, I didn’t dare think of asking you to pick her up, Thomas.”
This was an old routine. Gwen was looking at me expectantly, and I could have bitten off my tongue for the automatic answer that popped unbidden to my lips.
“Why, how ridiculous,” I found myself saying. “Of course I’ll pick her up.”
Gwen beamed, and her mother joined. Then they both said, as if in once voice, “It’s after four now. Don’t you think you’d better get ready?”
I nodded, feeling somehow uneasy. This all seemed far too much like the old, old pattern. But then I shrugged away my suspicions. After all, I was still cock of the roost. And it didn’t hurt to do an occasional favor . . .
THIS Alice friend of my mother-in-law’s proved to be a spinster of enormous proportions whose full name was Miss Alice Longwood. She was as short as she was fat, which meant plenty of both. It took two porters to cram her through the passageway and off the train. And it wasn’t until all her baggage, two trunks and four grips, had been dumped off after her that I saw the lap dog she had in tow.
It was one of those tiny, fluffy, evil-tempered dogs with a snub nose and a definite superiority complex.
After I had introduced myself, this Alice shrilled:
“So you’re Gwen’s husband?”
There was something about the way she said that which made it sound unflattering.
I admitted that I was Gwen’s husband, and suggested that she could check the bulk of her luggage at the station. She gave me a funny look, and said but of course not. She had to have her luggage with her.
We piled the trunks in the back seat, and the grips in the rear compartment. This Alice creature sat up in front with me, holding the dog in her lap. His name turned out to be—so help me God—“Bity” !
“Bity and I are so glad to have this pleasant interlude on our trip,” spinster Alice told me. “Bity and I are just exhausted. I am positively ravenous, and I know Bity is, too. Funny the way I recognized you right off. Of course Gwen’s mother told me what you looked like, so’s I’d recognize you when you met me at the station.”
My jaw went a trifle grim at this last, and I asked politely: “How long did Gwen’s mother expect this pleasure?”
“Oh, weeks,” shrilled Alice. “Simply weeks.” Her graying hair had been slightly, though not successfully, bleached. She wore it frizzed up around the back of her red, plump neck.
I remembered the line that had been given me. Directions as to how to get to the house by bus. Letter just came yesterday. I had been taken in as neatly as I’d ever been.
It wasn’t necessary to say much on the way to the house. Alice did all the talking. She reminisced shrilly about the fun she and Gwen’s mother had had as younger belles, discussed the horrors of her train ride, related in detail the victory she won over the railroad porter when he’d tried to put Bity in the baggage car.
“Can you imagine that?” she demanded. “Wanting Bity to travel as if he were an animal or something?”
I said I couldn’t imagine that, and a few minutes later we pulled up in front of the house.
Gwen and her mother met us, or I should say Alice, at the door. I was busy breaking my back with her baggage and by the time I got into the house they were all in the living-room.
“Where’ll I put the bags?” I asked.
Gwen’s mother smiled sweetly at me. “Why, in the guest room, Thomas, dear.”
I didn’t catch on, even then. I carried the works, trunks and bags, upstairs to the guest room.
When dinner was served I had the chance to see the world’s greatest appetite at work. Alice’s ability to carry on an endless stream of chatter while stuffing her mouth with everything she could get her plump red hands on was strictly phenomenal.
And Bity sat at the table.
I mean it. The damned little monster sat atop telephone books on an extra tall chair, lapping his food from a plate placed conveniently near the edge of the table for him!
Once when I went out into the kitchen to refill the water pitcher, Gwen followed me. Her eyes were smiling in pure girlish delight, and she hugged me warmly.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she whispered.
“Wonderful? What?”
“Mother,” Gwen whispered. “Don’t you see how having her old friend here has made her brighten up a hundred percent? She’s been so lonesome, Tom!”
I gagged a little on this. The only change I’d noticed in my dear mother-in-law had been an interest in someone’s business besides Gwen’s and mine.
“Oh, Tom,” Gwen said, not noticing my lack of reply. “I am so happy when mother is happy!” She sighed. “It’s been ages since she’s seen any of her old friends.”
I started toward the dining-room, and Gwen followed.
BITY had finished his dinner, and with a savage little yelp, leaped from his seat to the floor and trotted for the living-room.
“Isn’t Bity cute?” Alice demanded. “He’s all through, and now he’s going into the living-room for a nap by the fire.” And then she went on to repeat her victory over the porter who wanted Bity to ride in the baggage car like a bum.
But some sixth sense made me uneasy. I excused myself, saying I wanted to get a smoke, and went into the living-room.
Dear little Bity wasn’t taking a nap for himself. He was doing something far removed from that. He was proving that he hadn’t been housebroken any too well. And proving it against the leg of my newly purchased antique chair!
I stood there aghast, my jaw slack, unable to move for fully a minute. And during this time, little Bity went right on with his mission, all the while staring insolently at me as he performed his sacrilegious gesture!
I let out a shrill bleat of anger. But Bity had finished, and after a deft scratch of his hind paws, had leaped atop the chair itself, and sat there triumphantly leering at me.
For some reason I turned back to the dining-room, possibly thinking to summon Alice to remove her indecent little pet from the house that instant.
And then I heard Bity’s weird howl.
Alice heard it, too, and so did Gwen and her mother. They all looked bewilderedly at me. The expression on my face didn’t clear things up for them.
“Bity!” Alice shrilled. “Where is he? What’s going on? What’s wrong with him?” And then she was up from the table with incredible speed and dashing past me into the living-room. I wheeled and followed her, almost colliding with her wide back-quarters as she skidded to an abrupt stop.
Bity wasn’t in the chair any longer.
“Bity!” Alice shrieked, “where are you, darling?”
There was no answering yelp, and that first solitary, weird howl seemed to linger still in the air.
I looked quickly around the room. There was no sign of the small flea muff. And then something was suddenly tugging at the sleeve of my mind. Bity had jumped up into the chair; jumped up into the chair on which I had found it impossible to sit the night before!
Alice was down on all fours, presenting an extremely large target which would have made excellent kicking practice. Down on all fours, yelling wildly for Bity and seeking him under every conceivable nook and cranny.
But Bity wasn’t anywhere in the room. Any fool could see that. Any fool but Alice. And there was absolutely no way he could have made an exit other than right past me. I knew he hadn’t done that.
Gwen and her mother were in the living-room now, wondering vocally what was wrong, what had happened. Hysterically, Alice told them, and for a little while they joined in her search.
I lighted a cigarette, watching the frenzied search with a sort of pleased detachment. I had the firm conviction that Bity wouldn’t be found, that he had never left the chair after he’d leaped onto it, but had merely—through the strange power of the chair itself—been whipped, off into some never-never land!
DON’T ask me how I knew this. I didn’t know it. I just felt it. I’d never had such a certainty about anything else in my life before. I decided to prove it to myself. I broke in on the search.
“Now, now,” I announced, “he isn’t in the room. He didn’t run past me. He might have crawled outside through the window. It’s partly open, y’know.”
The living-room window actually was partly open. But I knew Bity hadn’t made his departure through there. It had been in my line of vision all along, and I’d have seen him.
“He might get hit by a truck!” Alice wailed.
I walked over to the fireplace and, ignoring the desecration Bity had performed on its leg, pulled the chair over to Alice.
“Sit down and relax a moment,” I suggested. “Nothing has happened to Bity. He’s just outside irrigating the landscape. I’ll run out and look for him.”
Red faced, wild eyed, Alice obeyed my suggestion as if hypnotized. Or at least she tried to.
I had stepped back and was standing a good three feet away from the chair when Alice made her effort to sit down.
She landed on the floor.
It hadn’t occurred to Gwen, her mother, or the massive Alice to watch the chair. But I had done so. And now I was positive as to what had happened. So fast as to be scarcely noticeable, the chair had skeetered just out of range of her bulky posterior.
I was certain now that I hadn’t been so drunk the night before as to have been unable to sit on that chair. I wouldn’t have been able to do so, drunk or sober. The chair wouldn’t stand to have anyone sitting on it.
Following the deafening thump of Alice’s near-miss, there was, of course, her shrill cry of pain and the startled cries from Gwen and her mother.
I stepped in quickly and helped haul our massive visitor to her feet and then to the couch. She was still whimpering wildly about Bity and insisting that he be found instantly.
“Stay right here, everybody,” I said. “I’ll run out and find him right now.”
I needed to get outside, even though I knew Bity wouldn’t be found. I had plenty of thinking to do—plenty. There was no doubt in my mind, now, that the chair was exactly what I had found it to be in my solo drinking bout the night before. My willingness to dismiss the facts as preposterously fantastic on waking with a hangover this morning had been nothing more than a subconscious fear of the incredible truth. My mental refusal to try again to sit on it was also a subconscious expression of fear.
I had heard that the human mind was a strange thing, and now I was quite willing to believe it. For throughout this entire day I had been deliberately closing my mind to the truth of what had happened the night before. I had been telling myself that I’d been so wildly drunk that the events concerning the chair had occurred in my imagination rather than reality. I had forced myself to believe those words, and now I was faced with the problem of eating them.
But this fantastic truth was not so difficult to accept. Subconsciously I had believed it all day, ever since my first experience with the chair the night before. Only in my conscious mind, a mind ridden with the barriers and taboos of the conventional, had I doubted the chair’s witchery.
I TOOK my time, smoking and strolling along the street and trying to figure out what it all amounted to.
“All right,” I told myself. “The chair moves. It won’t let anyone sit on it. It’s alive, or possessed, or something.”
I turned a corner and lighted another cigarette.
“But Bity sat on it,” I told myself. “Bity sat on it without a bit of trouble, and now the fleabag’s gone.”
This was a little tougher knot to gnaw. But I loosened it in surprisingly short time. The answer came in the middle of my next cigarette.
“Bity acted in a most ungentlemanly manner toward the chair!” I exclaimed. “So the chair let Bity sit on it in order to get even!” I became a little excited as I followed through my premise. “The chair wouldn’t let anyone sit on it, more than likely, if it didn’t have anything against that person.”
There was, of course, the final disturbing enigma to face. Where was Bity? Where did the chair take the mutt? What other world or hidden dimension was the chair the door to?
I had myself there. I’m not a psychic guy. I’ve never even been able to figure out the theory, let alone the practice, of occult mumbo-jumbo. But I tingled with excitement, nonetheless, at finding out. And my mental debate from then until the time I returned to the house some ten minutes later, was chiefly concerned with how I was going to find out.
