His records. Play them.
He lifted at the lid of the phonograph but it wouldn’t open. Why? he asked. Locked? No, it slid out. He slid it out, with a terrible noise, as if he had destroyed it. Tone arm. Spindle. He got one of his records out of its sleeve and placed in on the spindle. I can work these things, he said, and turned on the amplifiers, setting the mode to phono. Switch that activated the changer. He twisted it. The tone arm lifted; the turntable began to spin, agonizingly slowly. What was the matter with it? Wrong speed? No; he checked. Thirty-three and a third. The mechanism of the spindle heaved and the record dropped.
Loud noise of the needle hitting the lead-in groove. Crackles of dust, clicks. Typical of old quad records. Easily misused and damaged; all you had to do was breathe on them.
Background hiss. More crackles.
No music.
Lifting the tone arm, he set it farther in. Great roaring crash as the stylus struck the surface; he winced, sought the volume control to turn it down. Still no music. No sound of himself singing.
The strength the mescaline had over him began now to waver; he felt coldly, keenly sober. The other record. Swiftly he got it from its jacket and sleeve, placed it on the spindle, rejected the first record.
Sound of the needle touching plastic surface. Background hiss and the inevitable crackles and clicks. Still no music.
The records were blank.
PART THREE
Never may my woes be relieved,
Since pity is fled;
And tears and sighs and groans my weary days
Of all joys have deprived.
21
“Alys!” Jason Taverner called loudly. No answer. Is it the mescaline? he asked himself. He made his way clumsily from the phonograph toward the door through which Alys had gone. A long hallway, deep-pile wool carpet. At the far end stairs with a black iron railing, leading up to the second floor.
He strode as quickly as possible up the hall, to the stairs, and then, step by step, up the stairs.
The second floor. A foyer, with an antique Hepplewhite table off to one side, piled high with _Box_ magazines. That, weirdly, caught his attention; who, Felix or Alys, or both, read a low-class mass-circulation pornographic magazine like _Box?_ He passed on then, still–because of the mescaline, certainly–seeing small details. The bathroom; that was where he would find her.
“Alys,” he said grimly; perspiration trickled from his forehead down his nose and cheeks; his armpits had become steamy and damp with the emotions cascading through his body. “God damn it,” he said, speaking to her although he could not see her. “There’s no music on those records, no me. They’re fakes. Aren’t they?” Or is it the mescaline? he asked himself. “I’ve got to know!” he said. “Make them play if they’re okay. Is the phonograph broken, is that it? Needle point or stylus or whatever you call them broken off?” It happens, he thought. Maybe it’s riding on the tops of the grooves.
A half-open door; he pushed it wide. A bedroom, with the bed unmade. And on the floor a mattress with a sleeping bag thrown onto it. A little pile of men’s supplies: shaving cream, deodorant, razor, aftershave, comb. . . a guest, he thought, here before but now gone.
“Is anybody here?” he yelled.
Silence.
Ahead he saw the bathroom; past the partially opened door he caught sight of an amazingly old tub on painted lion’s legs. An antique, he thought, even down to their bathtub. He loped haltingly down the hail, past other doors, to the bathroom; reaching it, he pushed the door aside.
And saw, on the floor, a skeleton.
It wore black shiny pants, leather shirt, chain belt with wrought-iron buckle. The foot bones had cast aside the highheeled shoes. A few tufts of hair clung to the skull, but outside of that, there remained nothing: the eyes had gone, all the flesh had gone. And the skeleton itself had become yellow.
“God,” Jason said, swaying; he felt his vision fail and his sense of gravity shift: his middle ear fluctuated in its pressures so that the room caromed around him, silently in perpetual ball motion. Like a pourout of Ferris wheel at a child’s circus.
He shut his eyes, hung on to the wall, then, finally, looked again.
She has died, he thought. But when? A hundred thousand years ago? A few minutes ago?
Why has she died? he asked himself.
Is it the mescaline? That I took? _Is this real?_
It’s real.
Bending, he touched the leather fringed shirt. The leather felt soft and smooth; it hadn’t decayed. Time hadn’t touched her clothing; that meant something but he did not comprehend what. Just her, he thought. Everything else in this house is the same as it was. So it can’t be the mescaline affecting me. But I can’t be sure, he thought.
Downstairs. Get out of here.
He loped erratically back down the hail, still in the process of scrambling to his feet, so that he ran bent over like an ape of some unusual kind. He seized the black iron railing, descended two, three steps at once, stumbled and fell, caught himself and hauled himself back up to a standing position. In his chest his heart labored, and his lungs, overtaxed, inflated and emptied like a bellows.
In an instant he had sped across the living room to the front door–then, for reasons obscure to him but somehow important, he snatched up the two records from the phonograph, stuffed them into their jackets, carried them with him through the front door of the house, out into the bright warm sun of midday.
“Leaving, sir?” the brown-uniformed private cop asked, noticing him standing there, his chest heaving.
“I’m sick,” Jason said.
“Sorry to hear that, sir. Can I get you anything?”
“The keys to the quibble.”
“Miss Buckman usually leaves the keys in the ignition,” the cop said.
“I looked,” Jason said, panting.
The cop said, “I’ll go ask Miss Buckman for you.”
“No,” Jason said, and then thought, But if it’s the mescaline it’s okay. Isn’t it?
“‘No’?” the cop said, and all at once his expression changed. “Stay where you are,” he said. “Don’t head toward that quibble.” Spinning, he dashed into the house.
Jason sprinted across the grass, to the asphalt square and the parked quibble. The keys; were they in the ignition? No. Her purse. He seized it and dumped everything out on the seats. A thousand objects, but no keys. And then, crushing him, a hoarse scream.
At the front gate of the house the cop appeared, his face distorted. He stood sideways, reflexively, lifted his gun, held it with both hands, and fired at Jason. But the gun wavered; the cop was trembling too badly.
Crawling out of the far side of the quibble, Jason lurched across the thick moist lawn, toward the nearby oak trees. Again the cop fired. Again he missed. Jason heard him curse; the cop started to run toward him, trying to get closer to him; then all at once the cop spun and sped back into the house.
Jason reached the trees. He crashed through dry underbrush, limbs of bushes snapping as he forced his way through. A high adobe wall. . . and what had Alys said? Broken bottles cemented on top? He crawled along the base of the wall, fighting the thick underbrush, then abruptly found himself facing a broken wooden door; it hung partially open, and beyond it he saw other houses and a street.
It was not the mescaline, he realized. The cop saw it, too. Her lying there. The ancient skeleton. As if dead all these years.
On the far side of the street a woman, with an armload of packages, was unlocking the door of her ffipflap.
Jason made his way across the street, forcing his mind to work, forcing the dregs of the mescaline away. “Miss,” he said, gasping.
Startled, the woman looked up. Young, heavy-set, but with beautiful auburn hair. “Yes?” she said nervously, surveying him.
“I’ve been given a toxic dose of some drug,” Jason said, trying to keep his voice steady. “Will you drive me to a hospital?”
Silence. She continued to stare at him wide-eyed; he said nothing–he merely stood panting, waiting. Yes or no; it had to be one or the other.
The heavy-set girl with the auburn hair said, “I–I’m not a very good driver. I just got my license last week.”
“I’ll drive,” Jason said.
“But I won’t come along.” She backed away, clutching her armload of badly-wrapped brown-paper parcels. Probably she had been on her way to the post office.
“Can I have the keys?” he said; he extended his hand. Waited.
“But you might pass out and then my flipflap–”
“Come with me then,” he said.
She handed him the keys and crept into the rear seat of the flipflap. Jason, his heart pulsing with relief, got in behind the wheel, stuck the key into the ignition, turned the motor on, and, in a moment, sent the flipflap flipflapping up into the sky, at its maximum speed of forty knots an hour. It was, he noted for some odd reason, a very inexpensive model flipflap: a Ford Greyhound. An economy flipflap. And not new.