Specimens Part 2

The tiredness in Nancy's voice was giving way to animation as she talked. ''One doesn't just turn them up in one's garden, as a rule."

"Well, that's great, I guess. I suppose it means eventually we'll have Museum people out here digging up our yard."

"The thought had just barely crossed my mind, but I wasn't sure how you'd react."

"Tremendous." His voice was somewhat dry, but he had to smile. "What about the book?"

"Oh, that." Nancy's voice became more thoughtful. "Well, it's - weird. You're definitely not the hoaxing type, or I'd certainly be suspicious. Come on, though, you read the book through before you gave it to me. You were pulling my leg about the greasy smell, and the dream."

"Pulling your leg? That's a nice thought. But no, I wasn't. And hey, I didn't tell you yet about the dream I had last night.'' And he proceeded to do so, or he tried. He suspected that over the phone it sounded no more impressive or remarkable than any other particularly vivid dream. But it and the Indian dream had both been - something apart from ordinary experience. Trying to convey that, though, was hard and made him feel a little silly.

"Oh, Dan. Sometimes I worry about you." Nancy sounded about half serious. "I wish I was out there already, looking after you. And how are the kids, still sleeping well?"

"They're fine. Well, if you're really worried about me, rush on out. We'll find a place for you to sleep - somewhere. Heh, heh."

"Mmm-hmm. Sure. I just better not find any blond housekeepers when I do arrive.

Oh, d.a.m.n, did I say I'd come out tomorrow night? That's Tuesday evening, the shower, how could I have forgotten that? Oh, Danny.''

They went on to calculate that she would come out on Wednesday evening, or in the afternoon if she could get away from work a little early. The conversation went on to Museum shoptalk, and to other topics after that.

On Monday night, Dan's third night in the old house, there came the black-girl dream. As it started, he was standing in dark night and freezing cold, helping someone else who seemed to be carrying a burden in one arm to get down from the flat bed of some kind of truck or wagon.

Overhead there stretched a sprawl of stars, unbelievably numerous and bright. There was no moon. Ice in a frozen puddle cracked under the shoes of Dan's new host body as it moved. It took him only a moment to realize that he had landed in a woman's body this time out; he could feel the unfamiliar bulge and weight of two full b.r.e.a.s.t.s as he reached his arms up to help another woman climb down from the rear of the wagon.

From amidst a dim load of what looked like canvas stretched over straw the second woman came, the brilliant starlight letting Dan see her well enough to tell that she was a black girl who carried a baby-sized bundle held close against her with one arm. Behind her a young black man in dark, rough clothes also came crawling from concealment on the wagon. In a moment the two women and the man were standing in a huddle of unforced intimacy against the cold, the baby held more or less sheltered among their bodies.

Someone else, a little distance off, murmured something in a low voice, and the wagon began to roll away, hard-rimmed wheels going with a thud and rumble over frozen ruts. From beyond the piled-up load there came the clop of horses' feet and the mutter of their breath as the wagon moved.

Wordlessly, the black man who stood with the two women raised an arm, pointing up into the sky at an angle about half way between the horizon and the zenith. The women lifted their faces to the sky.

It briefly crossed Dan's mind that he must be on some high mountaintop, such was the clarity of the stars. But this sky might never have known the smoke of automobiles and factories, and was certainly innocent of the electric glare of the cities that Dan knew.

There was the familiar Dipper in the north, right side up for holding water; from the corner of the woman's vision Dan could see Polaris marking the pole almost exactly, but the eyes through which he saw were satisfied to find the Dipper and stay fixed on it for a long moment, while the woman let her lungs drink deep of icy air. Then she lowered her gaze and looked around.

They were standing atop a hill, but it was not a mountain. Even in the night Dan had no doubt of what hilltop he stood upon, though the house toward which the woman now turned her eyes was not objectively identifiable as his own. He got the impression that it was bigger than the tall house of the farm-boy dream. Only its dim outline could be seen, lighted from within by what was probably the glow of a single lamp. No other light was visible in all the dark countryside around.

"In the house, in the house," a man's voice was urging now, coming from that direction, speaking English with a soft and somehow rural-sounding accent, though not one as hard for Dan to understand as Red's and Pete's had been.

Obediently the people from the wagon moved. Beckoning them on from a position near the door of the house was the man who evidently had just spoken. As the three came toward him Dan saw that this man was white, and quite tall, at least in comparison with the three blacks. The white man smiled at them encouragingly, and beckoned. He had rather close-set eyes, and a jutting chin that was further exaggerated by a small tuft of ginger beard. In the lamplight from a window he appeared to be in his forties, and was armored against the cold by a thick coat and a fur cap.

There in the farmyard just before the door of the house they were joined by another, shorter, white man, who came on foot from the direction of some dimly visible outbuildings, where he seemed to have just driven the wagon.

"Tears to me no one's likely to be about, Brother Clareson," this second white man said, swinging his arms and stamping his feet. "Reckon our gent'man pa.s.senger can he'p me with the horses iffn he's a mind to."

"Ya.s.suh, ya.s.suh, I do that." And the young black man accompanied the wagon driver back into the outer darkness, where the horses could be heard stamping in the cold.

"Hurry in then, Brother Hollister," the taller white called after them, low-voiced.

"And we'll have some coffee for you both.''

In the kitchen a white woman of the tall man's age or more was waiting for them, smiling with faded blue eyes and compressed lips. She was wearing a cheerfully patterned shawl about her shoulders, and had just set down a gla.s.s-chimneyed lamp on a plain, scrubbed wooden table. On the wide top of a black metal kitchen stove, an enameled coffeepot sent up a breath of steam. The white woman, saying little but continuing to smile in a gentle, nearsighted way, began to hand out slabs of some kind of freshly baked cake, on small thick china plates.

The tall man called Clareson and the woman who was his wife or perhaps sister both urged the two black girls to take chiars at the scrubbed wooden table. The woman of the house began to come out of her seemingly abstracted state when she got a good look at the baby, and to fuss over it; after a conference with its mother, she began to prepare warm milk and bread for it in a little bowl.

The world of the dream began to blur somewhat for Dan, to blur and disappear intermittently as the woman whose body he dwelt in let her eyes close repeatedly in weariness only to have them pop open again. Dan's own mind remained impatiently alert even as the body he was in, lulled by the warmth and security of the kitchen, was drifting toward slumber in the high-backed chair.

After some timeless interval the black girl awoke with a start, at a touch from the hand of the white woman, whose kindly face was bending over her.

"And what is your name, child?"

"Oriana, m'am."

"Now you must call me Carrie. In the eyes of the Lord we are all equal as His children.

Now eat a little more, and warm yourself, and there'll be a snug place where you can sleep."

Oriana turned her head, and saw that the black man had come in, and was sitting on the floor in a corner of the kitchen, warming himself with an enamel ware cup of coffee, which he sipped with some uncertainty.

The dream abruptly became broken and disconnected at this point. Perhaps Oriana nodded into sleep again, and this sleep-within-sleep moved Dan's mind into some state of more normal dreaming. He saw and heard the white woman, Carrie Clareson, at the piano in the old house which men was new, a piano badly out of tune, and she was weeping as she played some n.o.ble old melody he should have recognized. And he stood beside her with a bark cup, catching blood that streamed from the arrow wounds in the side of the painted Indian girl. And . . .

. . . and abruptly the dream was clear again, and quite coherent. The three grown blacks and the infant were still waiting in the warm kitchen, but the table had been cleared, and the escaping former slaves were now all unselfconsciously sitting on the floor together while the straight chairs remained empty, and the three whites sitting around another table in the adjacent room discussed their fate in preoccupied voices. At least the two men talked, while Carrie Clareson nodded and smiled.

"It's just that we really weren't expecting three," Clareson was saying. It was a protest, though his tone was mild and conciliatory. ''And now there are actually four, if the infant is reckoned in. The next conductor - well, his means of transportation are somewhat more limited than yours."

The wagon-driver, looking uneasy in a parlor, pulled at the collar of his thick sweater, and then scratched his stubbly face with a work-hardened hand. "Wouldn't have a bit o'

tobacco about, would ye, Brother Clare-son? No, that's right, y 'don't use it.'' He emitted a faint sigh.

''I am sorry there is none at hand to offer you. I have failed to replenish our stock of brandy, also, or I would offer you some against the cold."

"S'all right, Rev'rend. Brother, I mean. Your good woman's coffee was mighty warmin'. Now just what d'ye suggest we do? I cain't very well take these folks back where they came from.'' The three resting, listening bodies in the kitchen stiffened momentarily.

''Certainly not!'' Clareson tugged thoughtfully at his ginger beard. "Similar difficulties have arisen in the past. We shall contrive to send them on somehow. Now the next conductor - really I see no good reason not to speak his name in front of you, Brother Hollister, but it is a matter of policy - "

"S'all right, Brother, no need fer me t'know."

"- should be willing to take the family on entire. The infant can scarcely be reckoned as a full person in terms of food or s.p.a.ce required. And young Oriana will be welcome to stay and sup with us until he can come back for her, or until some safe alternate means of continuing her journey should present itself."

. . . and the dream was breaking up again, s.p.a.ced with bleak intervals of nothingness.

Strange Indians stood in the kitchen, not breathing or moving, but yet not dead. The boy Peter ran naked and terrified across a field of summer clover . . . and then Dan was in the black girl's body in the old house once again, and the silence around Oriana was that absolute late-night stillness that only country dwellers know. Perhaps it was a different night, but anyhow the other black girl and her man and child were gone. A narrow sleeping pallet had been made for Oriana on the kitchen floor beside the stove, through whose grated door there came a glow of embers. It was a warm place, and perhaps she was more at ease with such an arrangement than she would have been in an upstairs bed.

The sound that had wakened her came again, the creak of a stair or floorboard within the house. Curled under a blanket, she opened her eyes without moving, and in a moment saw the man Clareson, dressed in his heavy coat and fur cap, pausing at the kitchen door before going out. He was looking in her direction. It was such a strange and terrible glance of pity and warning that she, accustomed to interpreting with great subtlety the expressions worn by pale faces, was up on her knees at once as soon as he had gone out and closed the door behind him. She was ready to jump up and flee, but once on her knees she paused. There was nowhere to run. Her glance darted this way and that about the room, and Dan could hear and feel the quickened beating of her heart.

There was a creaking and a thump from just outside, which Dan in a moment identified as the sounds an outside cellar door might make in being raised. This was confirmed when from beneath the kitchen there came the tramp of heavy boots descending a short stair. Then vaguer sounds, harder to make out, followed from below.

Somewhere upstairs in the house a clock was ticking, an ominous sound just on the edge of audibility. The silence of the world around it seemed to hold the house bound in like drifts of snow.

Then the booted feet again, coming up the cellar stairs. And with them . . . something else.

There came in a few moments a scratching at the door, and she thought it would be a dog. There was nothing intrinsically terrible in dogs, and her fears eased somewhat. But when the door eased open and it entered, she jumped to her feet and would have run away at any cost from what she saw in the dun reddish glow that came through the grate in the stove's door. In the breathless momentary pause, the sound of soft footsteps coming downstairs from the upper floor.

The shape in the doorway, with a few stray flakes of dry, cold snow eddying after it, and now the man of the house coming in to stand behind it, was not the shape of a dog, or of any animal that had ever breathed. It was dull gray in the dim light, mottled and dirty-looking, vaguely crab-like in its numerous appendages. It was somewhat bigger than a crawling man, and now as hideously familiar to Dan Post as it was strange and terrifying to Oriana.

She leaped nimbly to get the heavy kitchen table between herself and it, and s.n.a.t.c.hed up from the stove a heavy frying pan to use as weapon.

It came for her, round the table, with a dry scuttling of heavy, cloth-wrapped feet. It brought with it a vague smell of rotten grease, and the metallic-looking surface of it was s.h.i.+ny in spots as if with oil. The heavy frying pan slipped from her fingers as she swung it, and flew through the air to clang harmlessly from the beast's back as it might have bounced from a granite boulder. Oriana ran around the table the other way, and toward the man, who was standing inside the now-closed door with the same look of great sadness upon his face, and raising open arms that might be offering her protection. At least he was a man and not a beast out of h.e.l.l. His arms closed about her and held her, while her flesh cringed to feel the rending imaginary claws that would at any moment fasten on her from the back.

But there came only a gentle touch between her shoulder blades, such as might have come from the man's finger if both his hands had not been holding her arms already. A single gentle touch and then the world tipped round her as her head fell back helplessly, her whole body going limp, its weight suddenly caught up in the hard muscles of Clareson's arms.

In the parlor, the piano began to play, an old old tune that Dan had heard before. A hymn. "Carrie," Clare-son said hopelessly, almost as if to himself. "I had thought you might sleep through.'' And again: "Carrie . . . "in a low, despairing tone. But he received no answer, and he said no more. Holding Oriana, he managed with a little difficulty to get the kitchen door open again, and (with something heavy and cloth-footed walking after him) carried her to the outdoor cellar door, set at an angle between wall and ground. He had to set her down briefly on frozen earth while he raised the cellar door, and the icy wind tore at her bare legs and her exposed face and neck and arms. Then she was lifted again, and her limbs hung down slack and corpse-like as the man bore her down the cellar steps, now with his lantern on its wire handle swinging fron his right hand. Its light danced on the cellar walls of earth, and here on one solid wall already old, a wall of stones round from the river's wear, cemented together and pierced here with a vaulted doorway, leading to a stone-vaulted tunnel, going down . . .

FIVE.

On Tuesday morning Nancy left her apartment on Chicago's north side and drove to work as usual, maneuvering her Volkswagen on eastbound streets between Old Town and New Town until she reached the Outer Drive. Then she merged south into the eight- laned chariot race of rush hour on the Drive, whose swooping curves tore through parkland, keeping the quiescent lake in sight. Past beaches and small-craft harbors, through parks that had been defoliated of low shrubbery but not freed of the lurking violent; past statues of forgotten Germans, past deserted bridle paths, past the Skeet Club, where in an hour the shotguns would begin to pop, and fragmented clay pigeons settle in another layer upon the bottom of the lake.

She swung the small car handily through the painful S-turn where the roadway bridged the river, then worked her way over into the left-hand lane as the Drive topped a rise. The skyline of central Chicago loomed within toppling distance on her right, and the gray, cla.s.sically-proportioned bulk of the Museum came into view, low and sprawling, a mile ahead.

Imperturbably sitting just where it wished to sit, taking up exactly as much room as it liked, the Museum split the superhighway into northbound and southbound vessels that went around it on opposite sides, vein and artery from the city's heart. As if it had been sitting here from ancient days, as if it waited for this culture too to ripen for the harvest, to be ingested and digested and built into the cells of specimen cases in its vast marble guts.

Nancy left the Volks in the small employees' lot and walked up the long solemn slope of steps and in, exchanging good mornings with the familiar guard at the north entrance. Inside, she walked briskly across a corner of the great skylighted central hall, whose white marble immensity dwarfed preserved elephants and even a skeletal Tyrannosaurus as well as three-story totem poles, case after case of smaller exhibits, and a scattering of early people. Then Nancy ascended by elevator to the third floor offices.

From the large window beside her desk she had a view of the second-floor graveled roof, and across it a long row of windows on her own level. Endless cased slices of hardwood trees were visible through the nearer of those windows and gray-brown blobs that she knew were meteorites behind the farther. On Nancy's desk, besides the phone and typewriter, there waited yesterday's unfinished work. First, a small litter of letters from the public, queries from the curious on everything from fireflies to ancient Incas.

There was an unknown bug in a small box sent by an Iowa farmer, and a crackpot theory, with detailed diagrams, from Minneapolis. Nancy had to see that all were answered, by the proper experts. She might reply to the Minneapolis letter herself, having acquired some competence in the field of psychoceramics. Then there was a stack of building contractors' specifications, supposed to somehow help Public Relations explain to the public the inconveniences inevitable in the next stages of the Museum's decades-long remodeling process. There were also proofs of the introductory pages of a new guidebook.

All in all it was an exciting job, a good one in Nancy's estimation, and she was glad that she was going to be able to keep it for a while at least. Of course now the needs of Dan and his family - her family - were going to come first. Also, if she happened to get pregnant right away, that was going to mean the end of holding a regular job, at least for as long as the baby needed her at home.

She really liked Millie and Sam, and believed off and on that they really liked her, but she thought they were probably never going to think of her as their mother. Nancy really wanted to have two more children with Dan. Of course everyone these days talked about population pressure; but Nancy had the strong but unspoken feeling that her children with Dan were likely to be superior people, very intelligent and useful to society, and that certainly ought to count for something.

Nancy was in a mood to work this morning, and attacked the pile of letters energetically. When the phone rang she looked up with a start and realized that the time for her mid-morning coffee break had rolled around already.

It was Dan's voice on the line. "Nancy?"

"Yes! Well, this is a pleasant surprise, sir. What's up?"

"Oh, I just wanted to hear your lovely voice." A few moments of humming silence pa.s.sed. "I suppose it sounds kind of crazy, but I did feel a need to talk to you. Just to see if everything is still all right.''

"What do you mean? If everything's all right?"

''I - don't know. I had another of those lousy dreams last night and they, they stick with me somehow. I just don't feel too good."

In the back of Nancy's mind - not really very far toward the back - a tiny but demonic suspicion was sparked into life. It was the suspicion that Dan had never been able to rid himself sufficiently of Josie, his dead wife; that for him the approaching marriage was going to be an act of infidelity, on a subconscious level at least. And as Nancy understood Dan, or thought she did, that might very well be too much for him. It could make him ill in one way or another. Hadn't he mentioned mat Josie had appeared briefly, playing the piano, in one of those horrendous dreams of his?

But as yet these suspicions were not audible in Nancy's voice, nor had she even thought them out fully. She simply asked, with moderate concern: "What's wrong?"

"Well, I had another of those lousy dreams last night.'' It sounded as if he might not realize that he was repeating himself. "And - oh, I don't know. I don't have a fever, or pain, or upset stomach, or anything that I can really put my finger on. I suppose it's just nerves, moving into this d.a.m.ned house and all."

And all? Meaning marriage to one Nancy Hermanek? "Danny, I thought you liked the place."

''I did. I do. But at the same time the house is all tied up with these dreams." He tried to produce a laugh, but it didn't come out quite right.

"Oh, Dan." Sympathy and several levels of doubt were mixed up in Nancy's voice.

"I know how ridiculous it is. Look, I'm sorry I bothered you at work with it."

"Don't be silly. When something bothers you this much of course I want to know about it. I don't want you getting sick and delaying our wedding, hear? Promise me you'll see a doctor if you really don't feel well."

"Oh, it's nothing, really." And now his voice did sound much better.

"You didn't call me up just to tell me it was nothing, did you? Now honestly, Dan, I want you to have a check-up. Promise?"

"All right, promise." He sounded somehow relieved, as if he had wanted her to talk him into seeing a physician. "Maybe he can prescribe a tranquilizer or something. I'm sure there's nothing really wrong."

"Let's hope not. Who's your doctor? That fellow with some Jewish name, and his office up in Wilmette, right?"

"Shapiro. Yes, I'll give him a call. Are you coming out tonight?"

There was a pause. "Tonight's the shower, Dan. How are you feeling, really bad?"

"No!" He sounded annoyed now to the point of anger, anger with himself not her. ''I just forgot about the d.a.m.ned shower. And I didn't mean to upset you over nothing - I shouldn't have tried to talk about this over the phone. It's nothing urgent. Go ahead and enjoy your shower, Honey. I'll call the doctor and make an appointment for a check-up, and meanwhile we're all doing just fine out here."

They went on to talk of routine things, mainly the half dozen arrangements for the wedding that were still going to need attention. The photographer. The tuxedos.

Flowers. Musicians for the reception. The invitations that had been ordered but were not ready yet. By the time the conversation ended, Nancy's suspicions had been allayed, or at least she had been distracted from them by more prosaic and concrete worries.

Nancy as usual ate lunch in the large and moderately busy cafeteria that staff shared with the public. The scientist who had made the positive identification of Mrs. Follett's projectile point saw her there and came over briefly to the table where she and a couple of girl friends sat under the vast mural, more than half a century old, of a world map circa 1920.

"Got any more goodies for me, Nancy?" He was about sixty but looked younger, despite the youthful cut of his suit. On most men his age it would have had an effect the opposite of rejuvenation, but he had an inner sprightliness that carried it off. There was just a hint of some tough part of New York City still in his speech.

"Oh, in Dr. Baer. No, but after we move in and get settled we'll certainly want you to come out and look the place over.''

"I most certainly will, or else I'll send some of the young guys out. Maybe they can be more charming with your lady neighbor who owns the flowerbeds than I can." He grinned, knowing they couldn't be if they tried. "But maybe I shouldn't send 'em to the suburbs, they've all got hair like hippies." Baer himself displayed a neatly bushy set of iron-gray sideburns. He leaned on the table now, shaking his head in the negative at Nancy's invitation to sit down. "Wheatfield Park, huh? Just goes to show you what can be right under our noses sometimes. Burial mounds and Helton points. I suppose people on your block throw away a bucket of shards every time they dig a swimming pool."

Nancy said: "I don't know the house is on a burial mound. The rise of ground just has, a certain odd look to me."

"Well, we'll sure come and check it out, once you guys grow bored with honeymooning. And stop in and tell me if you should find anything new, hey?"

Nancy was again in a working mood for the afternoon, which went by quickly for her.

But because of the shower she got away a little early, fighting the small parking lot jam back onto the Drive, northbound this time, shortly before five o'clock. This time she looped off the Drive again before she had gone far, and spent long minutes creeping due west through Grant Park and the heart of the central city. Traffic gradually picked up speed as her route grew into the Eisenhower Expressway, which tunneled at ground level straight through the mountainous bulk of the main post office.