The Toynbee Convector Read online

  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.

  He arrived this night, moving with a terrible slowness to sit across the aisle from this woman of some years, her bosom like a fortress, her brow serene, her eyes with a kindness that had mellowed with time.

  There was a black medical bag at her side, and a thermometer tucked in her mannish lapel pocket The ghastly man’s paleness caused her left hand to crawl up along her lapel to touch the thermometer.

  “Oh, dear,” whispered Miss Minerva Halliday.

  The maître d’ was passing. She touched his elbow and nodded across the aisle. “Pardon, but where is that poor man going?”

  “Calais and London, Madame. If God is willing.”

  And he hurried off.

  Minerva Halliday, her appetite gone, stared across at that skeleton made of snow.

  The man and the cutlery laid before him seemed one. The knives, forks, and spoons jingled with a silvery cold sound. He listened, fascinated, as if to the sound of his inner soul as the cutlery crept, touched, chimed; a tin tinnabulation from another sphere. His hands lay in his lap like lonely pets, and when the train swerved around a long curve his body, mindless, swayed now this way, now that, toppling.

  At which moment the train took a greater curve and knocked the silverware, cluttering. A woman at a far table, laughing, cried out:

  “I don’t believe it!”

  To which a man with a louder laugh shouted:

  “Nor do I!”

  This coincidence caused, in the ghastly passenger, a terrible melting. The doubting laughter had pierced his ears.

  He visibly shrank. His eyes hollowed and one could almost imagine a cold vapor gasped from his mouth. Miss Minerva Halliday, shocked, leaned forward and put out one hand. She heard herself whisper:

  “I believe!”

  The effect was instantaneous.

  The ghastly passenger sat up. Color returned to his white cheeks. His eyes glowed with a rebirth of fire. His head swiveled and he stared across the aisle at this miraculous woman with words that cured.

  Blushing furiously, the old nurse with the great warm bosom caught hold, rose, and hurried off.

  Not five minutes later, Miss Minerva Halliday heard the maître d’ hurrying along the corridor, tapping on doors, whispering. As he passed her open door, he glanced at her.

  “Could it be that you are—”

  “No,” she guessed, “not a doctor. But a registered nurse. Is it that old man in the dining car?”

  “Yes, yes! Please, Madame, this way!” The ghastly man had been carried back to his own compartment.

  Beaching it, Miss Minerva Halliday peered within.

  And there the strange man lay strewn, his eyes wilted shut, his mouth a bloodless wound, the only life in him the joggle of his head as the train swerved.

  My God, she thought, he’s dead!

  Out loud she said, “I’ll call if I need you.”

  The maître d’ went away.

  Miss Minerva Halliday quietly shut the sliding door and turned to examine the dead man—for surely he was dea
d. And yet. . . .

  But at last she dared to reach out and to touch the wrists in which so much ice-water ran. She pulled back, as if her fingers had been burned by dry ice. Then she leaned forward to whisper into the pale man’s face.

  “Listen very carefully. Yes?” For answer, she thought she heard the coldest throb of a single heartbeat. She continued. “I do not know how I guess this. I know who you are, and what you are sick of—” The train curved. His head lolled as if his neck had been broken. “I’ll tell you what you’re dying from!” she whispered. “You suffer a disease—of people!”

  His eyes popped wide, as if he had been shot through the heart.

  She said: “The people on this train are killing you. They are your affliction.”

  Something like a breath stirred behind the shut wound of the man’s mouth.

  “Yesssss....ssss.”

  Her grip tightened on his wrist, probing for some pulse:

  “You are from some middle European country, yes? Somewhere where the nights are long and when the wind blows, people listen? But now things have changed, and you have tried to escape by travel, but...”

  Just then, a party of young, wine-filled tourists bustled along the outer corridor, firing off their laughter.

  The ghastly passenger withered.

  “How do... you...” he whispered, “... know.... thissss?”

  “I am a special nurse with a special memory. I saw, I met, someone like you when I was six—”

  “Saw?” the pale man exhaled.

  “In Ireland, near Kileshandra. My uncle’s house, a hundred years old, full of nun and fog and there was walking on the roof late at night, and sounds in the hall as if the storm had come in, and then at last this shadow entered my room. It sat on my bed and the cold from his body made me cold. I remember and know it was no dream, for the shadow who came to sit on my bed and whisper... was much... like you.”

  Eyes shut, from the depths of his arctic soul, the old sick man mourned in response:

  ‘And who... and what ...am I?”

  “You are not sick. And you are not dying... You are—” The whistle on the Orient Express wailed a long way off.

  “—a ghost,” she said.

  “Yesssss!” he cried.

  It was a vast shout of need, recognition, assurance. He almost bolted upright. “Yes!” At which moment there arrived in the doorway a young priest, eager to perform. Eyes bright, lips moist, one hand clutching his crucifix, he stared at the collapsed figure of the ghastly passenger and cried, “May I—?”

  “Last rites?” The ancient passenger opened one eye like the lid on a silver box. “From you? No.” His eye shifted to the nurse. “Her!”

  “Sir!” cried the young priest. He stepped back, seized his crucifix as if it were a parachute ripcord, spun, and scurried off. Leaving the old nurse to sit examining her now even more strange patient until at last he said:

  “How,” he gasped, “can you nurse me?”

  “Why—” she gave a small self-deprecating laugh. “We must find a way.”

  With yet another wail, the Orient Express encountered more mileages of night, fog, mist, and cut through it with a shriek.

  “You are going to Calais?” she said. “And beyond, to Dover, London, and perhaps a casde outside Edinburgh, where I will be safe—”

  “That’s almost impossible—” She might as well have shot him through the heart. “No, no, wait, wait!” she cried. “Impossible... without me! I will travel with you to Calais and across to Dover.”

  “But you do not know me!”

  “Oh, but I dreamed you as a child, long before I met someone like you, in the mists and rains of Ireland. At age nine I searched the moors for the Baskerville Hound.”

  “Yes,” said the ghastly passenger. “You are English and the English believe!”

  “True. Better than Americans, who doubt. French? Cynics! English is best. There is hardly an old London house that does not have its sad lady of mists crying before dawn.”

  At which moment, the compartment door, shaken by a long curve of track, sprang wide. An onslaught of poisonous talk, of delirious chatter, of what could only be irreligious laughter poured in from the corridor. The ghastly passenger wilted.

  Springing to her feet, Minerva Halliday slammed the door and turned to look with the familiarity of a lifetime of sleep-tossed encounters at her traveling companion.

  “You, now,” she asked, “who exactly are you?”

  The ghastly passenger, seeing in her face the face of a sad child he might have encountered long ago, now described his life:

  “I have lived’ in one place outside Vienna for two hundred years. To survive, assaulted by atheists as well as true believers, I have hid in libraries in dust-filled stacks there to dine on myths and moundyard tales. I have taken midnight feasts of panic and terror from bolting horses, baying dogs, catapulting tomcats... crumbs shaken from tomb lids. As the years passed, my compatriots of the unseen world vanished one by one as castles tumbled or lords rented out their haunted gardens to women’s clubs or bed-and-breakfast entrepreneurs. Evicted, we ghastly wanderers of the world have sunk in tar, bog, and fields of disbelief, doubt, scorn, or outright derision. With the populations and disbeliefs doubling by the day, all of my specter friends have fled. I am the last, trying to train across Europe to some safe, rain-drenched castle-keep where men are properly frightened by soots and smokes of wandering souls. England and Scotland for me!”

  His voice faded into silence.

  “And your name?” she said, at last.

  “I have no name,” he whispered. “A thousand fogs have visited my family plot A thousand rains have drenched my tombstone. The chisel marks were erased by mist and water and sun. My name has vanished with the flowers and the grass and the marble dust.” He opened his eyes.

  “Why are you doing this?” he said. “Helping me?”

  And at last she smiled, for she heard the right answer fell from her lips: “I have never in my life had a lark.”

  “Lark?”

  “My life was that of a stuffed owl. I was not a nun, yet never married. Treating an invalid mother and a half-bund father, I gave myself to hospitals, tombstone beds, cries at night, and medicines that are not perfume to passing men. So, I am something of a ghost myself, yes? And now, tonight, sixty-six years on, I have at last found in you a patient, magnificently different, fresh, absolutely new. Oh, Lord, what a challenge. A race! I will pace you, to face people off the train, through the crowds in Paris, then the trip to the sea, off the train, onto the ferry! It will indeed be a—”

  “Lark!” cried the ghastly passenger. Spasms of laughter shook him.

  “Larks? Yes, that is what we are!”

  “But,” she said, “in Paris, do they not eat larks even while they roast priests?” He shut his eyes and whispered, “Paris? Ah, yes.” The train wailed. The night passed. And they arrived in Paris. And even as they arrived, a boy, no more than six, ran past and froze. He stared at the ghastly passenger and the ghastly passenger shot back a remembrance of Antarctic ice floes. The boy gave a cry and fled. The old nurse flung the door wide to peer out.

  The boy was gibbering to his father at the far end of the corridor. The father charge along the corridor, crying:

  “What goes on here? Who has frightened my—?”

  The man stopped. Outside the door he now fixed his gaze on this ghastly passenger on the slowing braking Orient Express. He braked his own tongue.”—my son,” he finished.

  The ghastly passenger looked at him quietly with fog-gray eyes.

  “I—” The Frenchman drew back, sucking his teeth in disbelief. “Forgive me!” He gasped. “Regrets!”

  And turned to run, shove at his son. “Trouble-maker. Get!” Their door slammed.

  “Paris!” echoed through the train.

  “Hush and hurry!” advised Minerva Halliday as she bustled her ancient friend out onto a platform milling with bad tempers and misplaced luggage.


  “I am melting!” cried the ghastly passenger.

  “Not where I’m taking you!” She displayed a picnic hamper and flung him forth to the miracle of a single remaining taxicab. And they arrived under a stormy sky at the Pere Lachaise cemetery. The great gates were swinging shut. The nurse waved a handful of francs. The gate froze.

  Inside, they wandered at peace amongst ten thousand monuments. So much cold marble was there, and so many hidden souls, that the old nurse felt a sudden dizziness, a pain in one wrist, and a swift coldness on the left side of her face. She shook her head, refusing this. And they walked on among the stones.

  “Where” do we picnic?” he said.

  “Anywhere,” she said. “But carefully! For this is a French cemetery! Packed with cynics! Armies of egotists who burned people for their faith one year only to be burned for their faith the next! So, pick. Choose!” They walked. The ghastly passenger nodded. “This first stone. Beneath it: nothing. Death final, not a whisper of time. The second stone: a woman, a secret believer because she loved her husband and hoped to see him again in eternity... a murmur of spirit here, the turning of a heart. Better. Now this third gravestone: a writer of thrillers for a French magazine. But he loved his nights, his fogs, his castles. This stone is a proper temperature, like a good wine. So here we shall sit, dear lady, as you decant the champagne and we wait to go back to the train.”

  She offered a glass, happily. “Can you drink?”

  “One can try.” He took it. “One can only try.”

  The ghastly passenger almost “died” as they left Paris. A group of intellectuals, fresh from seminars about Sartre’s “nausea,” and hot-air ballooning about Simone de Beauvoir, streamed through the corridors, leaving the air behind them boiled and empty.

  The pale passenger became paler.

  The second step beyond Paris, another invasion! A group of Germans surged aboard, loud in their disbelief of ancestral spirits, doubtful of politics, some even carrying books titled Was God Ever Home?

  The Orient ghost sank deeper in his x-ray image bones.

  “Oh, dear,” cried Miss Minerva Halliday, and ran to her own compartment to plunge back and toss down a cascade of books.