The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

The series was his specialty in dreams or in fiction. At one time, during his writing career, he had twenty-one series going. He’d completed ten of them. The others were still waiting, cliff-hangers all, when that great editor in the skies arbitrarily canceled all of them.

As in life, so in death. He could never-never? Well, hardly ever-finish anything. Hie great uncompleted. He’d first become aware of that when, a troubled youth, he had poured out his torments and anxieties onto his college freshman advisor, who also happened to be his psychology teacher.

The professor, what was his name? O’Brien? He was a short, slim youth with a fiery manner and even fierier red hair. And he always wore a bow tie.

And now Peter Jairus Frigate was walking along in the fog and there was no sound except for the hooting of a distant owl. Sudden­ly, a motor was roaring, two lights shone faintly ahead of him, then brightly, and the motor screamed as he screamed. He dived to one side, floating, slowly floating, while the black bulk of the auto­mobile sped slowly toward him. As he inched through the air, his arms flailing, he turned his head toward it. Now he could see, beyond the glare of its lights, that it was a Duesenberg, the long low, classy roadster driven by Gary Grant in the movie he’s seen last week, Topper. A shapeless mass sat behind the wheel, its only visible features its eyes. They were the pale-blue eyes of his German grandmother, his mother’s mother, Wilhelmina Kaiser.

Then he was screaming because the car had swerved and headed directly toward him and there was no way he could escape being hit.

He woke up moaning. Eve said,sleepily, “Did you have a bad . . . ?” and she subsided into mumbles and a gentle snoring.

Peter got out of bed, a short-legged structure with a bamboo frame and rope supports for a mattress made of cloths magnetically attached around treated leaves. The earthen floor was covered with attached cloths. The windows were paned with the ising-glasslike intestinal membrane of the hormfish. Their squares shone faintly with the reflected light from the night sky.

He stumbled to the door, opened it, walked outside, and urinated. Rain still dripped from the thatched roof. Through a pass in the hills, he could see a fire blazing under the roof of a sentinel tower. It outlined the form of a guard leaning on the railing and looking down The River. The flames also shone on the masts and rigging of a boat he had never seen before. The other guard wasn’t on the tower, which meant that he would be down by the boat. He’d be question­ing the boat’s skipper. It must be all right, since there were no alarm drums beating.

Back in bed, he considered the dream. Its chronology was mixed up, which was par for dreams. For one thing, in 1937, brother Roosevelt had been only sixteen. The motorcycle, the distillery job, and the peroxided blondes were still two years away. The family wasn’t even living in that house anymore. It had moved to a newer, larger house a few blocks away.

There was that amorphous, sinister dark mass in the car, the thing with his grandmother’s eyes. What did that mean? It wasn’t the first time he had been horrified by a black hooded thing with Grandma Kaiser’s almost colorless blue eyes. Nor the first time he’d tried to figure out why she appeared in such horrendous guise.

He knew that she had come from Galena, Kansas to Terre Haute to help his mother take care of him just after he’d been born. His mother had told him that his grandmother had also taken care of him when he was five. He didn’t remember, however, ever seeing her before the age of twelve, when she had come to this house for a visit. But he was convinced that she had done something awful to him when he was an infant. Or it was something which had seemed awful. Yet she was a kindly old lady, though inclined to get hysterical. Nor did she have any control at all over her daughter’s children when they were left in her care.