“Listen, Jack,” Arnie Kott said, turning toward him. “I’m sorry–” His words were cut off. Jack did not hear the rest. The woman beside him was telling him something. Hurry, she was saying. I can’t wait either. Her breath came in short, brisk hisses from her mouth, and she gazed at him fixedly, her face close to his, her eyes huge, as if she were impaled. Neither of them heard Arnie. The room, now, was silent.
Had he missed something Arnie had said? Jack reached out and took hold of his glass, but there was nothing in it. “We’re out of booze,” he said, setting it back down on the coffee table.
“God sake,” Arnie said. “I got to hear how you’ve done, Jack. Can’t you give me anything?” Talking still, he moved away, from the living room into the kitchen; his voice dimmed. Beside Jack the woman still stared up at him, her mouth weak, as if he were holding her tightly to him, as if she could hardly breathe. We have to get out of this place and be by ourselves, Jack realized. Then, looking around, he saw that they were alone; Arnie had gone out of the room and could no longer see them. In the kitchen he was conversing with his tame Bleekman. And so he was already alone with her.
“Not here,” Doreen said. But her body fluttered, it did not resist him as he squeezed her about the waist; she did not mind being squashed because she wanted to, too. She could not hold back either. “Yes,” she said. “But hurry.” Her nails dug into his shoulders and she shut her eyes tight, moaning and shuddering. “At the side,” she said. “It unbuttons, my skirt.”
Bending over her he saw her languid, almost rotting beauty fall away. Yellow cracks spread through her teeth, and the teeth split and sank into her gums, which in turn became green and dry like leather, and then she coughed and spat up into his face quantities of dust. The Gubbler had gotten her, he realized, before he had been able to. So he let her go. She settled backward, her breaking bones making little sharp splintering sounds.
Her eyes fused over, opaque, and from behind one eye the lashes became the furry, probing feet of a thick-haired insect stuck back there wanting to get out. Its tiny pin-head red eye peeped past the loose rim of her unseeing eye, and then withdrew; after that the insect squirmed, making the dead eye of the woman bulge, and then, for an instant, the insect peered through the lens of her eye, looked this way and that, saw him but was unable to make out who or what he was; it could not fully make use of the decayed mechanism behind which it lived.
Like overripe puff balls, her boobies wheezed as they deflated into flatness, and from their dry interiors, through the web of cracks spreading across them, a cloud of spores arose and drifted up into his face, the smell of mold and age of the Gubbler, who had come and inhabited the inside long ago and was now working his way out to the surface.
The dead mouth twitched and then from deep inside at the bottom of the pipe which was the throat a voice muttered, “You weren’t fast enough.” And then the head fell off entirely, leaving the white pointed stick-like end of the neck projecting.
Jack released her and she folded up into a little dried-up heap of flat, almost transparent plates, like the discarded skin of a snake, almost without weight; he brushed them away from him with his hand. And at the same time, to his surprise, he heard her voice from the kitchen.
“Arnie, I think I’ll go home. I really can’t take much of Manfred; he never stops moving around, never sits still.” Turning his head he saw her in there, with Arnie, standing very close to him. She kissed him on the ear. “Good night, dear,” she said.
“I read about a kid who thought he was a machine,” Arnie said, and then the kitchen door shut; Jack could neither hear nor see them.
Rubbing his forehead he thought, I really am drunk. _What’s wrong with me?_ My mind, splitting. . . he blinked, tried to gather his faculties. On the rug, not far from the couch, Manfred Steiner cut out a picture from a magazine with blunt scissors, smiling to himself; the paper rustled as he cut it, a sound that distracted Jack and made it even more difficult for him to put in focus his wandering attention.
From beyond the kitchen door he heard heavy breathing and then labored, prolonged grunts. What are they doing? he asked himself. The three of them, she and Arnie and the tame Bleekman, together . . . the grunts became slower and then ceased. There was no sound at all.
I wish I was home, Jack said to himself with desperate, utter confusion. I want to get out of here, but how? He felt weak and terribly sick and he remained on the couch, where he was, unable to break away, to move or think.
A voice in his mind said, Gubble gubble gubble, I am gubble gubble gubble gubble.
Stop, he said to it.
Gubble, gubble, gubble, gubble, it answered.
Dust fell on him from the walls. The room creaked with age and dust, rotting around him. Gubble, gubble, gubble, the room said. The Gubbler is here to gubble gubble you and make you into gubbish.
Getting unsteadily to his feet he managed to walk, step by step, over to Arnie’s amplifier and tape recorder. He picked up a reel of tape and got the box open. After several faulty, feeble efforts he succeeded in putting it on the spindle of the transport.
The door to the kitchen opened a crack, and an eye watched him; he could not tell whose it was.
I have to get out of here, Jack Bohlen said to himself. Or fight it off; I have to break this, throw it away from me or be eaten.
It is eating me up.
He twisted the volume control convulsively so that the music blared up and deafened him, roared through the room, spilling over the walls, the furniture, lashing at the ajar kitchen door, attacking everyone and everything in sight.
The kitchen door fell forward, its hinges breaking; it crashed over and a thing came hurriedly sideways from the kitchen, dislodged into belated activity by the roar of the music. The thing scrabbled up to him and past him, feeling for the volume control knob. The music ebbed.
But he felt better. He felt sane, once more, thank God.
Jack Bohlen dropped his father off at the abstract office and then, with Manfred, flew on to Lewistown, to Doreen Anderton’s apartment.
When she opened the door and saw him she said, “What is it, Jack?” She quickly held the door open and he and Manfred went on inside.
“It’s going to be very bad tonight,” he told her.
“Are you sure?” She seated herself across from him. “Do you have to go at all? Yes, I suppose so. But maybe you’re wrong.”
Jack said, “Manfred has already told me. He’s already seen it.”
“Don’t be scared,” Doreen said softly.
“But I am,” he said.
“_Why_ will it be bad?”
“I don’t know. Manfred couldn’t tell me that.”
“But–” She gestured. “You’ve made contact with him; that’s wonderful. That’s what Arnie wants.”
“I hope you’ll be there,” Jack said.
“Yes, I’ll be there. But–there’s not much I can do. Is my opinion worth anything? Because I’m positive that Arnie will be pleased; I think you’re having an anxiety attack for no reason.”
“It’s the end,” Jack said, “between me and Arnie–tonight. I know it, and I don’t know why.” He felt sick to his stomach. “It almost seems to me that Manfred does more than know the future; in some way he controls it, he can make it come out the worst possible way because that’s what seems natural to him, that’s how he sees reality. It’s as if by being around him we’re sinking into his reality. It’s starting to seep over us and replace our own way of viewing things, and the kind of events we’re accustomed to see come about now somehow _don’t_ come about. It’s not natural for me to feel this way; I’ve never had this feeling about the future before.”
He was silent, then.
“You’ve been around him too much,” Doreen said. “Tendencies in you that are–” She hesitated. “Unstable tendencies, Jack. Allied to his; you were supposed to draw him into our world, the shared reality of our society. . . instead, hasn’t he drawn you into his own? I don’t think there’s any precognition; I think it’s been a mistake from the start. It would be better if you got out of it, if you left that boy–” She glanced toward Manfred, who had gone to the window of her apartment to stare out at the street below. “If you didn’t have anything more to do with him.”