‘Damn it!’
Someone knocked on the door.
He went to answer it. The landlord was there. ‘You’ll have to stop shouting,’ he said. ‘The neighbors are complaining.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Joe, stepping outside and half shutting the door. ‘We’ll try to be quiet—’
Then he heard the running feet. Before he could turn, the door slammed and locked. He heard Annie cry out triumphantly. He hammered at the door. ‘Annie, let me in, you fool!’
‘Now, take it easy, Mr Tiller,’ cautioned the landlord.
‘That little idiot in there, I’ve got to get inside—’
He heard the voices again, the loud and the high voices, and the shrill wind blowing and the dancing music and the glasses tinkling. And a voice saying, ‘Let him in, let him do whatever he wants. We’ll fix him. So he’ll never hurt us again.’
He kicked at the door.
‘Stop that,’ said the landlord. ‘I’ll call the police.’
‘Call them, then!’
The landlord ran to find a phone.
Joe broke the door down.
Annie was sitting on the far side of the room. The room was dark, only the light from a little ten-dollar radio illuminating it. There were a lot of people there, or maybe shadows. And in the center of the room, in the rocking chair, was the old woman.
‘Why, look who’s here,’ she said, enchanted.
He walked forward and put his fingers around her neck.
Ma Perkins tried to get free, screamed, thrashed, but could not.
He strangled her.
When he was done with her, he let her drop to the floor, the paring knife, the spilled peas flung everywhere. She was cold. Her heart was stopped. She was dead.
‘That’s just what we wanted you to do,’ said Annie tonelessly, sitting in the dark.
‘Turn the lights on,’ he gasped, reeling. He staggered back across the room. What was it, anyway? A plot? Were they going to enter other rooms, all around the world? Was Ma Perkins dead, or just dead here? Was she alive everywhere else?
The police were coming in the door, the landlord behind them. They had guns. ‘All right, buddy, up with them!’
They bent over the lifeless body on the floor. Annie was smiling. ‘I saw it all,’ she said. ‘He killed her.’ ‘She’s dead all right,’ said one of the policemen. ‘She’s not real, she’s not real,’ sobbed Joe. ‘She’s not real, believe me.’
‘She feels real to me,’ said the cop. ‘Dead as hell.’ Annie smiled.
‘She’s not real, listen to me, she’s Ma Perkins!’ ‘Yeah, and I’m Charlie’s aunt. Come on along, fellow!’ He felt himself turn and then it came to him, in one horrid rush, what it would be like from here on.
After tonight, him taken away, and Annie returned home, to her radio, alone in her room for the next thirty years. And all the little lonely people and the other people, the couples, and groups all over the country in the next thirty years, listening and listening.
And the lights changing to mists and the mists to shadows and the shadows to voices and the voices to shapes and the shapes to realities, until, at last, as here, all over the country, there would be rooms, with people in them, some real, some not, some controlled by unrealities, until all was a nightmare, one not knowable from the other.
Ten million rooms with ten million old women named Ma peeling potatoes in them, chuckling, philosophizing. Ten million rooms in which some boy named Aldrich played with marbles on the floor. Ten million rooms where guns barked and ambulances rumbled. God, God, what a huge, engulfing plot.
The world was lost, and he had lost it for them. It had been lost before he began. How many other husbands are starting the same fight tonight, doomed to lose at last, as he lost, because the rules of logic have been warped all out of shape by a little black evil electric box?
He felt the police snap the silver handcuffs tight.
Annie was smiling. And Annie would be here, night after night, with her wild parties and her laughter and travels, while he was far away.
‘Listen to me!’ he screamed.
‘You’re nuts!’ said the cop, and hit him.
On the way down the hall, a radio was playing.
In the warm light of the room as they passed the door, Joe peered swiftly in, one instant. There, by the radio, rocking, was an old woman, shelling some fresh green peas.
He heard a door slam far away and his feet drifted.
He stared at the hideous old woman, or was it a man, who occupied the chair in the center of the warm and swept-clean living room. What was she doing? Knitting, shaving herself, peeling potatoes? Shelling peas? Was she sixty, eighty, one hundred, ten million years old?
He felt his jaw clench and his tongue lie cold and remote in his mouth.
‘Come in,’ said the old woman–old man. ‘Annie’s fixing dinner in the kitchen.’
‘Who are you?’ he asked, his heart trembling.
‘You know me,’ the person said, laughing shrilly. ‘I’m Ma Perkins. You know, you know, you know.’
In the kitchen he held to the wall and his wife turned toward him with a cheese grater in her hand. ‘Darling!’
‘Who’s–who’s—’ He felt drunk, his tongue thick. ‘Who’s that person in the living room, how did she get here?’
‘Why, it’s only Ma Perkins, you know, from the radio,’ his wife said with casual logic. She kissed him a sweet kiss on the mouth. ‘Are you cold? You’re shaking.’
He had time only to see her nod a smile before they dragged him on.
The End
