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that was good news, and potentially far more important:
The enemy could not directly control his mind
. If it could, it would have had no need to punish him to alter his behavior.
Good news, but not, at the moment, of much help. The eyes he met now in the
mirror were his own, but changed a little for the worse from what his own eyes
used to be.
"All right." It was a weary, empty voice, his own but changed a little, like
the eyes. "You win. I'll show you how to shave."
He let the chilling easing water run a little longer on the small burn.
Then, angry with himself for caving in so easily before what was actually a
minor pain (but it had not been minor when he thought he might be made to
watch his flesh literally boiled away no, not then) he walked to the upstairs
bath and got out his electric razor. At once control was briefly reimposed,
evidently so controller could give the
device a little study before letting him use it. What did it fear that he
might do? Kill himself?
Of course! Stanton, the previous owner of the house. He was probably the one
who had left the sledgehammer and crowbar in the basement. What was it Ventris
had said of him? Nervous breakdown, something like that, and then he did away
with himself. And Nancy had been sorry for unknowingly bringing up the subject
as a joke.
Had there perhaps been small burn marks somewhere on Stanton's body? And how,
exactly, had Stanton died?
Control went away, to let him use the razor for himself, and he began to
shave. If Stanton had brought the new tools to the basement, had it been with
some idea of his own in mind? Or had he been acting under compulsion? Had he
then found a way to kill himself, and thus escape this slavery? Or had he been
tried as a tool and then discarded, his mind perhaps unable to bear the strain
of mad visions and demonic puppetry?
Dan found he couldn't think it all through, not yet anyway. Right now he still
had about all he could do to bear up under the strains himself. He finished
his shave, looked at the results in the mirror, and then began without much
thought to wash away the traces of dried blood remaining from the scratches
that his daughter's nails had left.
Suddenly the memory of that recent struggle became too overpowering. For just
a moment he failed to refuse to think about it, and that moment's failure was
too much. His image in the mirror went blurred and then it vanished in his
tears.
The controller gave him a couple of minutes (had Stanton been denied even that
much relief, an ultimately poor economy from the controller's point of view?)
and then shut off his tears as if by a turned valve, and in the middle of a
ragged sob it took over his lungs and throat to form a deep, calm breath. It
casually wiped his eyes and finished the little clean-up job on his scratched
cheek. Then, tightening or loosening his facial muscles one by one in small
increments, it little by little expunged the frozen look of suffering from his
face.
The puppet face in the mirror was not that of the real Dan Post, not quite
yet. But already it was getting closer.
EIGHT
Wednesday morning's mail still lay unopened on Nancy's desk, though lunchtime
was approaching. The little red book was in her hands, and she was staring at
it. Her neat mind, used to sorting out
problems into their proper compartments as a first step in solution, was
stalled on this one. If this had come in as a question from the public, she
would have had to reply that there was no Curator of Strange Old
Diaries, not at this museum anyway. Try the Historical Society.
Page 43
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Of course her real problem was not just the book itself, but the book and Dan.
But consider just the book, which was all she had in hand to study at the
moment. The first question that came naturally to mind on reading it was
whether or not the woman who wrote it was insane.
Consider the first entry, dated May (or perhaps March, the writing was quite
poor) 10, 1857. In it the woman who kept the diary lamented over the arrival
"last night "of "more passengers'' who, she was sure, were likely to be "bound
to the devil, some of their number if not all."
And in a June entry (the woman had used the diary only sporadically, evidently
as an outlet for her troubled mind) it was specified that "he"
(in context, only the devil could be meant) dwelt "right under the house."
The mention of "passengers" would seem to connect the book, and therefore the
house, with the Underground Railroad, in confirmation of the local folklore
that the real estate agent Ventris had once mentioned.
Only two names were mentioned in the book. There was passing mention in a
couple of places of a man named Schmiegel (that seemed to be the spelling) and
his family; Nancy got the impression that
Schmiegel was some kind of a tenant farmer or renter of land from
"James", the husband of the diarist.
And James was the key to it all. The woman mentioned several times the great
lengths she was going to, trying to keep the diary from falling into his
hands how after every entry she crept up into the attic and hid the book
behind the chimney there. The strain on her had undoubtedly been terrible,
whatever its real causes may have been. The entries in the diary became
progressively more incoherent, and the writing worse, until at last it was
almost completely illegible.
The part that held Nancy back from going to work was decipherable, though,
after she had puzzled over it for a while. It was part of the entry for
October 12, 1857, which discussed at greater length than ever before James's
"hideous bondage" apparently to the devil himself, " it began with his
smelling strange odors, as our fathers might have ascribed to Brimstone from
the Pit. And he was afflicted with terrible dreams, of Indians and their
savage rites carried out in unknown tongues, and of a devilish beast or
creature that they worshipped. I have no one to tell these things, nor would
anyone any longer believe that Satan comes to take possession of a Christian
soul,
such as James was when first we came here and he rebuilt this house& "
There was more, but that was the heart of it. Smelling strange odors, and
afflicted with terrible dreams, and then hell somehow took over, and more
victims were bound to the devil. Nancy shook her head, put on a
self-deprecating smile to see how it might feel, and put the book down. She
took up and opened the first envelope of her mail, and skimmed twice through
the letter inside without being able to understand what it was about.
Hopeless.
Red book in hand, she headed down the corridor to look for Dr.
Baer.
As soon as Dan had finished his morning chores his master took him on another
tour of the windows on the second floor, to make its first real, daylight
survey of the surrounding neighborhood. A passing aircraft was even more
interesting than last night's, that had been visible by its lights alone.
Another sight that for some reason drew the controller's prolonged attention
was that of a nursing home located about a block and a half to the northwest;
there a trio of whiteheaded elders were visible through some intervening tree
branches as they sat quietly on a porch. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]