‘Has Susan told you what’s been happening in Jerusalem’s Lot since Friday night?’
‘No. She said she wanted to wait until we were all together.’
‘Before she does, will you tell me exactly what happened at your house?’
Matt’s face darkened, and for a moment the mask of convalescence fluttered. Ben glimpsed the old man he had seen sleeping the day before.
‘If you’re not up to it-’
‘No, of course I am. I must be, if half of what I suspect is true.’ He smiled bitterly. ‘I’ve always considered myself a bit of a free thinker, not easily shocked. But it’s amazing how hard the mind can try to block out something it doesn’t like or finds threatening. Like the magic slates we had as boys. If you didn’t like what you had drawn, you had only to pull the top sheet up and it would disappear.’
‘But the line stayed on the black stuff underneath forever,’ Susan said.
‘Yes.’ He smiled at her. ‘A lovely metaphor for the interaction of the conscious and unconscious mind. A pity Freud was stuck with onions. But we wander.’ He looked at Ben. ‘You’ve heard this once from Susan?’
‘Yes, but-’
‘Of course. I only wanted to be sure I could dispense with the background.’
He told the story in a nearly flat, inflectionless voice, pausing only when a nurse entered on whisper-soft crepe soles to ask him if he would like a glass of ginger ate. Matt told her it would be wonderful to have a ginger ale, and he sucked on the flexible straw at intervals as he finished. Ben noticed that when he got to the part about Mike going out the window backward, the ice cubes clinked slightly in the glass as he held it. Yet his voice did not waver; it retained the same even, slightly inflected tones that he undoubtedly used in his classes. Ben thought, not for the first time, that he was an admirable man.
There was a brief pause when he had finished, and Matt broke it himself.
‘And so,’ he said. ‘You who have seen nothing with your own eyes, what think you of this hearsay?’
‘We talked that over for quite a while yesterday,’ Susan said. ‘I’ll let Ben tell you.’
A little shy, Ben advanced each of the reasonable explanations and then knocked it down. When he mentioned the screen that fastened on the outside, the soft ground, the lack of ladder feet impressions, Matt applauded.
‘Bravo! A sleuth!’
Matt looked at Susan. ‘And you, Miss Norton, who used to write such well-organized themes with paragraphs like building blocks and topic sentences for mortar? What do you think?’
She looked down at her hands, which were folding a pleat of her dress, and then back up at him. ‘Ben lectured me on the linguistic meanings of
‘If it can be arranged so that secrecy will not be breached, I will take a polygraph test,’ he said softly.
She colored a little. ‘No, no-don’t misunderstand me, please. I’m convinced that something is going on in town. Something… horrible. But… this… ’
He put his hand out and covered hers with it. ‘I understand that, Susan. But will you do something for me?’
‘If I can.’
‘Let us… the three of us… proceed on the premise that all of this is real. Let us keep that premise before us as fact until-and
‘But you don’t think it will be, do you?’
‘No,’ he said softly. ‘After a long conversation with myself, I’ve reached my decision. I believe what I saw.’
‘Let’s put questions of belief and unbelief behind us for the minute,’ Ben said. ‘Right now they’re moot.’
‘Agreed,’ Matt said. ‘What are your ideas about procedure?’
‘Well,’ Ben said, ‘I’d like to appoint you Researcher General. With your background, you’re uniquely well fitted for the job. And you’re off your feet.’
Matt’s eyes gleamed as they had over Cody’s perfidy in declaring his pipe off limits. ‘I’ll have Loretta Starcher on the phone when the library opens. She’ll have to bring the books down in a wheelbarrow.’
‘It’s Sunday,’ Susan reminded. ‘Library’s closed.’
‘She’ll open it for me,’ Matt said, ‘or I’ll know the reason why.’
‘Get anything and everything that bears on the subject,’ Ben said. ‘Psychological as well as pathological and mythic. You understand? The whole works.’
‘I’ll start a notebook,’ Matt rasped. ‘Before God, I will!’ He looked at them both. ‘This is the first time since I woke up in here that I feel like a man. What will you be doing?’
‘First, Dr Cody. He examined both Ryerson and Floyd Tibbits. Perhaps we can persuade him to exhume Danny Glick.’
‘Would he do that?’ Susan asked Matt.
Matt sucked at his ginger ale before answering. ‘The Jimmy Cody I had in class would have, in a minute. He was an imaginative, open-minded boy who was remarkably resistant to cant. How much of an empiricist college and med school may have made of him, I don’t know.’
‘All of this seems roundabout to me,’ Susan said. ‘Especially going to Dr Cody and risking a complete rebuff.
