The Darrell Schweitzer MEGAPACK ®. Darrell Schweitzer
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James Megapack
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The Murray Leinster Megapack
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The Talbot Mundy Megapack
The Andre Norton Megapack
The H. Beam Piper Megapack
The Mack Reynolds Megapack
The Rafael Sabatini Megapack
The Saki Megapack
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack
The Robert Sheckley Megapack
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TRANSIENTS
I remember—
I remember a rowhouse in West Philadelphia where the stained wooden paneling and reproduction antique furniture and the fire in the fireplace on a dark November evening all conspired to produce the pleasant, if incongruous, atmosphere of an Olde Countrie Inne. I remember sitting by that fire so many times in a padded chair, listening to the flames crackling, and the sounds of my wife preparing dinner in the kitchen at the back of the house.
I remember my wife, too. Her name was Martina, but at times it seems I have only one image of her remaining: that of her bringing me my slippers and the newspaper as I sit in that chair by the fireplace after a long day’s work. That isn’t right. It makes her seem more like a faithful dog than a person, but she really did do those things, from her own sense of routine, infusing order into the world around her. I remember the repeated things. Most of the rest melts away, like mist before the sun.
I remember, finally, the pair of slippers she brought me on a particular, foul November evening. They were made of brown leather, with white fur around the edges, and were very worn.
I held them up.
“But these aren’t mine.”
She shrugged. “Whose are they then? It’s your feet that have been going in them all this time.”
“All what time?”
Now she looked at me strangely. “Since the summer before last, when we got them at that Indian place in Maine. Don’t you remember?”
I put the slippers on. They certainly felt as if I’d been wearing them since the summer before last. I retreated into making a joke about it.
“Ah, yes, the Squash-a-ma-quoddy Indians. How could I forget?”
She didn’t laugh. She just said, “Alan, your brain is going soft,” and went into the kitchen to resume her cooking, leaving me sitting there, staring down at the slippers. Now there is little terror in a pair of slippers, but I felt a touch of unease just then, like that first, subtle, downward jolt when the elevator cable begins to fray.
I must have known somehow that right there it began. From that instant, we began to drift apart.
I try to remember.
* * * *
“Gabby stayed late at school for band practice,” Martina said over dinner. “Then she’ll be at Alice Conover’s for a while.”
Gabrielle was our daughter, aged eleven, and Alice Conover was her best friend. I still remember that much, although I can barely call them to mind.
“Oh, and by the way, Joe Meese called from work after you left, and said he’s hosting another of his poker parties tonight. Why don’t you go? I wanted to watch something on PBS anyway.”
I went. By the time we had finished eating and the dishes were cleared away, the wind was gusting outside, and rain and sleet rattled against the windows, but I had decided that, yes, a night of gambling away pocket change and telling dirty jokes was the very thing for the indefinable unease which had come over me. I put on a coat and a thin plastic raincoat over that and went to the door.
“Don’t be out too late,” Martina called. “It may be Friday, but we have that flea market tomorrow.”
“Yes, yes, I remember. See you about eleven.”
I stepped out onto the porch and locked the door. It was as I turned and reached for the iron porch gate that I noticed a man standing on the sidewalk in front of the house, huddled in a shapeless coat, bareheaded and dripping in the savage weather.
He was old, perhaps sixty-five, and disheveled, but he wasn’t threadbare or filthy, and he lacked that empty look the city’s population of homeless lunatics usually have. He wasn’t a bag person. He just looked…lost as he stood there, not exactly staring at me, or anything in particular. The thought came to me that he might be a burglar scouting out the neighborhood, but I flinched inwardly at the sheer absurdity of the idea.
I stood with one hand on the gate.
“May I help you with something? Are you looking for someone?”
His eyes met mine briefly, and for an instant his face came alive, first something almost like joyful recognition, then sadness, then that blank expression again. He merely stood there in the rain and cold, and I was the one who began to shiver.
“I said, may I help you?”
Still he stood there silently. I debated going back into the house rather than leaving Martina alone with this guy just outside, but I didn’t. I tried to shrug him off as one of the city’s peculiar sights. So I opened the gate, stepped through, shut it again, and walked briskly down the steps, and started to get into my car.
Then I noticed that the man was pointing at me. His hand was shaking, not from cold, but for gentle emphasis, as if to say, yes, I know you. I know everything.
I got into the car quickly, slammed the door shut, and locked it, then looked up to see the stranger walking away from me toward the end of the block. I watched him go until he was around the corner. Then I started the car. When I got to that corner, I looked for him, but he was gone.
There. There, too, it began.
* * * *
Joe Meese lived in the Germantown section of the city. It was an easy drive, the streets empty because of the weather. Joe’s street was lined with trees, so many of them that in the darkness and the wind they whipped and writhed and swayed like waves in a hurricane. The rain came in curtains, then sleet again, rattling like pebbles on the car’s roof.
I ran to Joe’s front porch, rang the bell, and stood there shivering, nervously hopping up and down, muttering to myself, “Come on. Come on—”
There was a familiar barking on the other side of the door. Heavy claws scratched wood. It was Woof, the Meeses’ oversized setter/collie/whatever. If I stood on tiptoe I could see the eager brown-and-white face staring up at me through the door’s glass panels.
“Hey! Bark louder. Make them let me in.”
The tone of the barking changed, no longer a challenge, but instead an expectant yelping.
“Glad to see you, too. Now, make enough noise so Joe can hear you.”