He stepped back, looked at Edith Bailey. Her full red lips were moist and gleaming. Her oddly opaque eyes glowed strangely at him. Her voice was low, yet somehow, very intense.
“Wonderful laboratory demonstration, Doctor. But I don’t think many of your student embryos would appreciate it.”
Doctor Spechaug nodded, smiled gently. “No. An unorthodox case.” He lit a cigarette, and she took one. Their smoke mingled with the dissipating morning mist. And he kept on staring at her. A pronounced sweater girl with an intellect. This—he could have loved. He wondered if it were too late.
Doctor Spechaug had never been in love. He wondered if he were now with this fundamental archetypal beauty. “By the way,” he was saying, “what are you doing in this evil wood?”
Then she took his arm, very naturally, easily. They began walking slowly along the cool, dim path.
“Two principal reasons. One, I like it here; I come here often. Two, I knew you always walk along this path, always late for your eight o’clock class. I’ve often watched you walking here. You walk beautifully.”
He did not comment. It seemed unnecessary now.
“The morning’s almost gone,” she observed. “The sun will be out very warm in a little while. I hate the sun.”
On an impulse he said: “I’m going away. I’ve wanted to get out of this obscene nest of provincial stupidity from the day I first came here. And now I’ve decided to leave.”
“What are you escaping from?”
He answered softly. “I don’t know. Something Freudian, no doubt. Something buried, buried deep. Something too distasteful to recognize.”
She laughed. “I knew you were human and not the cynical pseudo-intellectual you pretended to be. Disgusting, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“Being human, I mean.”
“I suppose so. I’m afraid we’re getting an extraordinarily prejudiced view. I can’t help being a snob here. I despise and loathe peasants.”
“And I,” she admitted. “Which is merely to say, probably, that we loathe all humanity.”
“Tell me about yourself,” he said finally.
“Gladly. I like doing that—to one who will understand. I’m nineteen. My parents died in Hungary during the War. I came here to America to live with my uncle. But by the time I got here he was dead, too. And he left me no money, so there was no sense being grateful for his death. I got a part-time job and finished high school in Chicago. I got a scholarship to—this place.” Her voice trailed off. She was staring at him.
“Hungary!” he said and repeated it. “Why—I came from Hungary!”
Her grip on his arm tightened. “I knew—somehow. I remember Hungary—its ancient horror. My father inherited an ancient castle. I remember long cold corridors and sticky dungeons, and cobwebbed rooms thick with dust. My real name is Burhmann. I changed it because I thought Bailey more American.”
“Both from Hungary,” mused Doctor Spechaug. “I remember very little of Hungary. I came here when I was three. All I remember are the ignorant peasants. Their dumb, blind superstition—their hatred for—”
“You’re afraid of them, aren’t you?” she said.
He started. “The peasants. I—” He shook his head. “Perhaps.”
“You’re afraid,” she said. “Would you mind telling me, Doctor, how these fears of yours manifest themselves?”
He hesitated; they walked. Finally he answered. “I’ve never told anyone but you. There are hidden fears. And they reveal themselves consciously in the absurd fear of seeing my own reflection. Of not seeing my shadow. Of —”
She breathed sharply. She stopped walking, turned, stared at him. “Not—not seeing your—reflection!”
He nodded.
“Not seeing your—shadow—!”
“Yes.”
“And the full moon. A fear of the full moon, too?”
“But how did you know?”
“And you’re allergic to certain metals, too. For instance—silver?”
He could only nod.
“And you go out in the night sometimes—and do things—but you don’t remember what?”
He nodded again.
Her eyes glowed brightly. “I know. I know. I’ve known those same obsessions ever since I can remember.”
Doctor Spechaug felt strangely uneasy then, a kind of dreadful loneliness.
“Superstition,” he said. “Our Old World background, where superstition is the rule, old, very old superstition. Frightened by them when we were young. Now those childhood fixations reveal themselves in crazy symptoms.”
He took off his coat, threw it into the brush. He rolled up his shirt sleeves. No blood visible now. He should be able to catch the little local passenger train out of Glen Oaks without any trouble. But why should there be any trouble? The blood—
He thought too that he might have killed the tramp, that popping sound.
She seemed to sense his thoughts. She said quickly: “I’m going with you, Doctor.”
He said nothing. It seemed part of the inevitable pattern.
They entered the town. Even for mid-morning the place was strangely silent, damply hot, and still. The ‘town’ consisted of five blocks of main street from which cow paths wound off aimlessly into fields, woods, meadows and hills. There was always a few shuffling, dull-eyed people lolling about in the dusty heat. Now there were no people at all.
As they crossed over toward the shady side, two freshly clothed kids ran out of Davis’ Filling Station, stared at them like vacant-eyed lambs, then turned and spurted inside Ken Wanger’s Shoe Hospital.
Doctor Spechaug turned his dark head. His companion apparently hadn’t noticed anything ominous or peculiar. But to him, the whole scene was morose, fetid and brooding.
They walked down the cracked concrete walk, passed the big plate-glass windows of Murphy’s General Store which were a kind of fetish in Glen Oaks. But Doctor Spechaug wasn’t concerned with the cultural significance of the windows. He was concerned with not looking into it.
And oddly, he never did look at himself in the glass, neither did he look across the street. Though the glass did pull his gaze into it with an implacable somewhat terrible insistence. And he stared. He stared at that portion of the glass which was supposed to reflect Edith Bailey’s material self—but didn’t reflect anything. Not even a shadow.
They stopped. They turned slowly toward each other. He swallowed hard, trembled slightly. And then he knew deep and dismal horror. He studied that section of glass where her image was supposed to be. It still wasn’t.
He turned. And she was still standing there. “Well?”
And then she said in a hoarse whisper: “Your reflection—where is it?”
And all he could say was: “And yours?”
Little bits of chuckling laughter echoed in the inchoate madness of his suddenly whirling brain. Echoing years of lecture on—cause and effect, logic. Little bits of chuckling laughter. He grabbed her arm.
“We—we can see our own reflections, but we can’t see each other’s!”
She shivered. Her face was terribly white. “What—what is the answer?”
No. He didn’t have it figured out. Let the witches figure it out. Let some old forbidden books do it. Bring the problem to some warlock. But not to him. He was only a Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology. But maybe—
“Hallucinations,” he muttered faintly. “Negative hallucinations.”
“Doctor. Did you ever hear the little joke about the two psychiatrists who met one morning and one said, ‘You’re feeling excellent today. How am I feeling?’”
