“You are badly off,” he said. “My dear Martha—”
“Sit down!”
“My dear Martha,” he moved back in the couch, chuckling softly. “What have you been reading?”
“About the Marionettes is all.”
“That poppycock? Good God, Martha, I’m ashamed of you. It’s not true. I looked into it!”
“What!”
“Of course!” he cried, in delight. “I have so many social obligations, and then my first wife came back from India as you know and demanded my time and I thought how fine it would be if I had a replica of myself made, as bait you might say, to turn my wife off my trail, to keep her busy, how nice, eh? But it was all false. Just me. I thought I needed a change.
So I went on to Alice and tired of her. And went on to Helen Kingsley, you remember her, don’t you? And tired of her. And on to Ann Montgomery. And that didn’t last. Oh, Martha, there are at least six duplicates of me, mechanical hypocrites, ticking away tonight, in all parts of the town, keeping six people happy. And do you know what I am doing, the real I?
“I’m home in bed early for the first time in thirty years, reading my little book of Montaigne’s essays and enjoying it and drinking a hot glass of chocolate milk and turning out the lights at ten o’clock. I’ve been asleep for an hour now, and I shall sleep the sleep of the innocent until morning and arise refreshed and free.”
“Stop!” she shrieked.
“I’ve got to tell you,” he said. “You’ve cut several of my ligaments with your bullets. I can’t get up. The doctors, if they came, would find me out anyway, I’m not that perfect. Perfect enough, but not that good. Oh, Martha, I didn’t want to hurt you. Believe me.
I wanted only your happiness. That’s why I was so careful with my planned withdrawal. I spent fifteen thousand dollars for this replica, perfect in every detail. There are variables. The saliva for one. A regrettable error. It set you off. But you must know that I loved you.”
She would fall at any moment, writhing into insanity, she thought. He had to be stopped from talking.
“And when I saw how the others loved me,” he whispered to the ceiling, eyes wide, “I had to provide replicas for them, poor dears. They love me so. You won’t tell them, will you, Martha? Promise me you won’t give the show away. I’m a very tired old man, and I want only peace, a book, some milk and a lot of sleep. You won’t call them up and give it away?”
“All this year, this whole year, I’ve been alone, alone every night,” she said, the coldness filling her. “Talking to a mechanical horror! In love with nothingness! Alone all that time, when I could have been out with someone real!”
“I can still love you, Martha.”
“Oh God!” she cried, and seized up the hammer.
“Don’t, Martha!”
She smashed his head in and beat at his chest and his thrashing arms and wild legs. She beat at the soft head until steel shone through, and sudden explosions of wire and brass coggery showered about the room with metal tinkles.
“I love you,” said the man’s mouth. She struck it with the hammer and the tongue fell out. The glass eyes rolled on the carpet. She pounded at the thing until it was strewn like the remains of a child’s electric train on the floor. She laughed while she was doing it.
In the kitchen she found several cardboard boxes. She loaded the cogs and wires and metal into these and sealed the tops. Ten minutes later she had summoned the houseboy from below.
“Deliver these packages to Mr. Leonard Hill, 17 Elm Drive,” she said, and tipped the boy. “Right now, tonight. Wake him up, tell him it’s a surprise package from Martha.”
“A surprise package from Martha,” said the boy.
After the door closed, she sat on the couch with the gun in her hand, turning it over and over, listening. The last thing she heard in her life was the sound of the packages being carried down the hall, the metal jingling softly, cog against cog, wire against wire, fading.
The End
