Sentimental journey, I suppose you’d call it.”
Frowning at Jim, Handahl said, “Didn’t think you ever liked this town
well enough to feel sentimental about it.”
Jim shrugged. “Attitudes change.”
“Glad to hear it.” Handahl turned to Holly again. “He started coming
in here soon after he moved in with his grandfolks, every Tuesday and
Friday when new books and magazines arrived from the distributor in
Santa Barbara.” He had put aside the Windex. He was arranging counter
displays of chewing gum, breath mints, disposable lighters, and pocket
combs. “Jim was a real reader then. You still a real reader?”
“Still am,” Jim said with growing uneasiness, terrified of what Handahl
might say next. Yet for the life of him, he did not know what the man
could say that would matter so much.
“Your tastes were kinda narrow, I remember.” To Holly: “Used to spend
his allowance buying most every science fiction or spook-’em paperback
that came in the door. Course, in those days, a two-dollar-a-week
allowance went pretty far, if you remember that a book was about
forty-five or fifty cents.”
Claustrophobia settled over Jim, thick as a heavy shroud. The pharmacy
began to seem frighteningly small, crowded with merchandise, and he
wanted to get out of there.
It’s coming, he thought, with a sudden quickening of anxiety. It’s
coming.
Handahl said, “I suppose maybe he got his interest in weird fiction from
his mom and dad.”
Frowning, Holly said, “How’s that?”
“I didn’t know Jamie, Jim’s dad, all that well, but I was only one year
behind him at county high school. No offense, Jim, but your dad had
some exotic interests-though the way the world’s changed, they probably
wouldn’t seem as exotic now as back in the early fifties.”
“Exotic interests?” Holly prodded.
Jim looked around the pharmacy, wondering where it would come from,
which route of escape might be blocked and which might remain open. He
was swinging between tentative acceptance of Holly’s theory and
rejection of it, and right now, he was sure she had to be wrong. It
wasn’t a force inside him. It was entirely a separate being, just as
The Friend was. It was an evil alien, just as The Friend was good, and
it could go anywhere, come out of anything, at any second, and it was
coming, he knew it was coming, it wanted to kill them all.
“Well,” Handahl said, “when he was a kid, Jamie used to come in here -it
was my dad’s store then-and buy those old pulp magazines with robots,
monsters, and scanty-clad women on the covers. He used to talk a lot
about how we’d put men on the moon someday, and everyone thought he was
a little strange for that, but I guess he was right after all.
Didn’t surprise me when I heard he’d given up being an accountant, found
a showhiz wife, and was making his living doing a mentalist act.”
“Mentalist act?” Holly said, glancing at Jim. “I thought your dad was
an accountant, your mom was an actress.”
“They were,” he said thinly. “That’s what they were-before they put
together the act.”
He had almost forgotten about the act, which surprised him. How could
he have forgotten the act? He had all the photographs from the tours,
so many of them on his walls; he looked at them everyday, yet he’d
pretty much forgotten that they had been taken during travels between
performances.
It was coming very fast now.
Close. It was very close.
He wanted to warn Holly. He couldn’t speak.
Something seemed to have stolen his tongue, locked his jaws.
It was coming.
It didn’t want him to warn her. It wanted to take her by surprise.
Arranging the last of the counter displays, Handahl said, “It was a
tragedy, what happened to them, all right. Jim, when you first came to
town to stay with your grandfolks, you were so withdrawn, nobody could
get two words out of you.”
Holly was watching Jim rather than Handahl.
She seemed to sense that he was in grave distress.
“Second year, after Lena died,” Handahl said, “Jim pretty much clammed
up altogether, totally mute, like he was never going to talk another