‘Those things happen alla time,’ said Mr. Peters, the garage mechanic, chewing. ‘Ever peek in the Missing People’s Bureau file? It’s that long.’ He illustrated. ‘Can’t tell what happens to most of ‘em.’
Grandma cut in. ‘Anyone want more dressing?’ She ladled liberal portions from the chicken’s sad interior. Douglas watched, thinking about how that chicken had had two kinds of guts — God-made and man-made.
Well, how about three kinds of guts?
Eh?
Why not?
Conversation continued merry about the mysterious death of so-and-so, and, oh yes, remember a week ago, Marion Barsumian died of heart failure, but maybe that didn’t connect up, or did it, you’re crazy, forget it, why talk about it at supper, on a full stomach? So.
Cigarettes fired, the diners idled lazily into the parlour, where Grandpa let somebody interrupt him on occasions when he needed breath.
‘Never can tell,’ said the garage mechanic. ‘Maybe we got a vampire in town.’
‘In the year 1927? Oh, go on now.’
‘Sure. Kill ‘em with silver bullets. Anything silver for that matter. I read it in a book somewhere, once. Sure, I did.’
Douglas sat on the floor looking up at Mr. Koberman who ate with wooden knives and forks and spoons, and carried only copper pennies in his pocket.
‘It’d be poor judgment,’ said Grandpa, ‘to call anything by a name. We don’t even know what a hobgoblin or a vampire or a troll is. Could be a lot of things. You can’t heave them into categories with labels, and say they’ll act one way or another. That’d be silly. They’re people, people who do things. Yes, that’s the way to put it — people who do thing’s.’
‘Good evening, everyone,’ said Mr. Koberman, and got up and went out for his evening walk to work.
The radio was turned on. Card games were played. Ice-cream was bought and served later. Then, the good-nights, and into bed.
The stars, the moon, the wind, the clock ticking and the chiming of hours into dawn, the sun coming up, and here it was another morning, another day, and Mr. Koberman coming from his walk after breakfast. Douglas stood off like a small mechanism whirring and watching with carefully microscopic eyes.
At noon, Grandma went to the store to buy groceries.
Douglas yelled outside Mr. Koberman’s door for a minute, and then tried to enter. This time the door was locked. He had to run get the pass-key.
Clutching the pass-key, and the pieces of coloured glass nervously, he entered and closed the door and heard Mr. Koberman breathing deep. Douglas placed the blue glass fragment over his own eyes.
Looking through it, he found himself in a blue room, in a blue world different from the world he knew. As different as was the red world. Aquamarine furniture, cobalt bedclothes, turquoise ceilings, and the sullen dark blue of Mr. Koberman’s face and arms, and his blue chest rising, falling. Also — something else.
Mr. Koberman’s eyes were wide open, staring at him with a hungry darkness. Douglas fell back, pulled the blue glass from his face. Mr. Koberman’s eyes were shut. Blue glass again — open. Blue glass away — shut. Blue glass again — open. Away — shut. Funny. Douglas experimented, trembling. Through the glass the eyes seemed to peer hungrily, avidly through the closed lids, like little flashlights. Without the blue glass they seemed tight shut.
But it was the rest of Mr. Koberman’s body. . .
Douglas must have stood amazed for five minutes. Thinking about blue worlds, red worlds, yellow worlds, side by side, living together like glass panes around the big white stair window. Side by side, the coloured panes, the different worlds; Mr. Koberman had said so himself.
So this was why the windows had been broken. At least partially why.
‘Mr. Koberman, wake up!’
No response.
‘Mr. Koberman, where do you work at night? Mr. Koberman, where do you work?’
A little breeze stirred the blue window shade.
‘In a red world or a green world or a yellow one, Mr. Koberman!’
Over everything was a blue-glass silence.
‘Wait there,’ said Douglas.
He walked out of the room, walked downstairs to the kitchen and pulled open the great squeaking drawers where all the knives lay gleaming. He picked out the sharpest, biggest one. Very calmly he walked into the hall, climbed back up the stairs again, opened the door to Mr. Koberman’s room and closed it.
Grandma was busy fingering a pie-crust into a pan when Douglas entered the kitchen to put something on the table.
‘Grandma, what’s this?’
She glanced up briefly, over her glasses. ‘I don’t know.’
It was square, like a box, and elastic. It was bright orange in colour. It had four square tubes, coloured blue, attached to it. It smelled funny. Not good but yet not bad.
‘Ever see anything like it, Grandma?’
‘No.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
Douglas left it there, went out of the kitchen. Five minutes later he returned with something else. ‘How about this?’
It resembled a bright pink linked chain with a purple triangle at one end.
‘Don’t bother me,’ sniffed Grandma. ‘It’s only a chain.’
He went away. Next time he came with two hands full. A ring, a square, a pyramid, a rectangle — and other shapes. ‘This isn’t all. Lots more where this came from.’
Grandma said, ‘Yes, yes,’ in a far-off tone, very busy.
‘You were wrong, Grandma.’
‘About what?’
‘About all people being the same inside.’
‘Stop talking nonsense.’
‘Where’s my piggy-bank?’ he asked.
‘On the mantel.’
‘Thanks.’
He tromped into the parlour, reached up for the piggy-bank.
Grandpa came home from the office at five-fifteen.
‘Grandpa, come upstairs.’
‘Sure, son. Why?’
‘Something to show you. It’s not nice. But it’s interesting.’
Grandpa chuckled, followed his grandson’s feet up to Mr. Koberman’s room.
‘Grandma mustn’t know about this; she wouldn’t like it,’ said Douglas. He pushed the door wide. ‘There.’
Grandfather gasped.
Douglas remembered the last scene all the rest of his life. Standing over the naked body, the coroner and his assistants. Grandma, downstairs, asking somebody, ‘What’s going on up there?’ and Grandpa saying, shakily, ‘I’ll take Douglas away on a long vacation so he can forget this whole ghastly affair. Ghastly, ghastly affair!’
Douglas said, ‘Why should it be bad? I don’t see anything bad. I don’t feel bad.’
The coroner shivered and said: ‘Koberman’s dead all right.’
His assistant sweated. ‘Did you see those things in the pan of water and in the wrapping paper?’
‘Oh, My God, My God, yes, I saw them.’
‘Christ.’
The coroner bent over Mr. Koberman’s body. ‘This better be kept secret, boys. It wasn’t murder. It was a mercy the boy acted. God knows what may have happened if he hadn’t.’
‘What was Koberman — a vampire? a monster?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Something — not human.’ The coroner moved his hands deftly over the suture.
Douglas was proud of his work. He’d gone to much trouble. He had watched Grandma carefully and remembered. Needle and thread and all. All in all, Mr. Koberman was as neat a job as any chicken ever popped into hell by Grandma.
‘I heard the boy say that Koberman lived even after all those things were taken out of him. Kept on living. God.’
‘Did the boy say that?’
‘He did.’
‘Then, what killed Koberman?’
The coroner drew a few strands of sewing thread from their bedding. ‘This — ‘ he said.
Sunlight blinked coldly off a half-revealed treasure trove; six dollars and seventy cents’ worth of silver dimes inside Mr. Koberman’s chest.
‘I think Douglas made a wise investment,’ said the coroner, sewing the flesh back up over the ‘dressing’ quickly.
1947
The end
