“That’s right, Hoppy,” Cas Stone agreed, nodding. The others nodded, too, all of them, or at least most of them.
“Christ sake, Hoppy,” Bonny Keller said severely. “Calm down or you’ll shake yourself right off your cart.” She eyed him in her stem domineering way and he felt himself recede; he drew back in spite of himself. “What’s been going on here?” Bonny demanded.
Fred Quinn, the pharmacist, said, “Why, floppy’s been imitating Walt Dangerfield so well you’d think it was him!”
The others nodded, chiming in with their agreement.
“You have no brother, Edie,” Hoppy said to the little girl. “Why do you say your brother wants to hear the reading when you have no brother?” He laughed and laughed, The girl remained silent. “Can I see him?” he asked. “Can I talk to him? Let me hear him talk and—I’ll do an imitation of him.” Now he was laughing so hard that he could barely see; tears filled his eyes and he had to wipe them away with an extensor.
“That’ll be quite an imitation,” Cas Stone said.
“Like to hear that,” Earl Colvig said. “Do that, Hoppy.”
“I’ll do it,” Hoppy said, “as soon as he says something to me.” He sat in the center of his ‘mobile, waiting. “I’m waiting,” he said.
“That’s enough,” Bonny Keller said. “Leave my child alone.” Her cheeks were red with anger.
To Edie, ignoring the child’s mother, Hoppy said, “Where is he? Tell me where—is he nearby?”
“Lean down,” Edie said. “Toward me. And he’ll speak to you.” Her face, like her mother’s, was grim.
Hoppy leaned toward her, cocking his head on one side, in a mock-serious gesture of attention.
A voice, speaking from inside him, as if it were a part of the interior world, said, “How did you fix that record changer? How did you really do that?”
Hoppy screamed.
Everyone was staring at him, white-faced; they were on their feet, now, all of them rigid.
“I heard Jim Fergesson,” Hoppy said.
The girl regarded him calmly. “Do you want to hear my brother say more, Mr. Harrington? Say some more words to him, Bill; he wants you to say more.”
And, in Hoppy’s interior world, the voice said, “It looked like you healed it. It looked like instead of replacing that broken spring—”
Hoppy wheeled his cart wildly, spun up the aisle to the far end of the room, wheeled again and sat panting, a long way from the Keller girl; his heart pounded and he stared at her. She returned his stare silently, but now with the faint trace of a smile on her lips.
“You heard my brother, didn’t you?” she said.
“Yes,” Hoppy said. “Yes I did.”
“And you know where he is.”
“Yes.” He nodded. “Don’t do it again. Please. I won’t do any more imitations if you don’t want me to; okay?” He looked pleadingly at her, but there was no response there, no promise. “I’m sorry,” he said to her. “I believe you now.”
“Good lord,” Bonny said softly. She turned toward her husband, as if questioning him. George shook his head but did not answer.
Slowly and steadily the child said, “You can see him too, if you want, Mr. Harrington. Would you like to see what he looks like?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to.”
“Did he scare you?” Now the child was openly smiling at him, but her smile was empty and cold. “He paid you back because you were picking on me. It made him angry, so he did that.”
Coming up beside floppy, George Keller said, “What happened, Hop?”
“Nothing,” he said shortly.
Scared me, he thought. Fooled me, by imitating Jim Fergesson; he took me completely in, I really thought it was Jim again. Edie was conceived the day Jim Fergesson died; I know because Bonny told me once, and I think her brother was conceived simultaneously. But—it’s not true; it wasn’t Jim. It was—an imitation.
“You see,” the child said, “Bill does imitations, too.”
“Yes.” He nodded, trembling. “Yes, he does.”
“They’re good.” Edie’s dark eyes sparkled.
“Yes, very good,” Hoppy said. As good as mine, he thought. Maybe better than mine. I better be careful of him, he thought, of her brother Bill; I better stay away. I really learned my lesson.
It could have been Fergesson, he realized, in there. Reborn, what they call reincarnation; the bomb might have done it somehow in a way I don’t understand. Then it’s not an imitation and I was right the first time, but how’ll I know? He won’t tell me; he hates me, I guess because I made fun of his sister Edie. That was a mistake; I shouldn’t have done that.
“Hoode hoode hoo,” he said, and a few people turned his way; he got some attention, here and there in the room. “Well, this is your old pal,” he said. But his heart wasn’t in it; his voice shook. He grinned at them, but no one grinned back. “Maybe we can pick up the reading a little while more,” he said. “Edie’s brother wants to listen to it.” Sending out an extensor, he turned up the volume of the radio, tuned the dial.
You can have what you want, he thought to himself. The reading or anything else. How long have you been in there? Only seven years? It seems more like forever. As if—you’ve always existed. It had been a terribly old, wizened, white thing that had spoken to him. Something hard and small, floating. Lips overgrown with downy hair that hung trailing, streamers of it, wispy and dry. I bet it was Fergesson, he said to himself; it felt like him. He’s in there, inside that child.
I wonder. Can he get out?
Edie Keller said to her brother, “What did you do to scare him like you did? He was really scared.”
From within her the familiar voice said, “I was someone he used to know, a long time ago. Someone dead.”
“Oh,” she said, “so that’s it. I thought it was something like that.” She was amused. “Are you going to do any more to him?”
“If I don’t like him,” Bill said, “I may do more to him, a lot of different things, maybe.”
“How did you know about the dead person?”
“Oh,” Bill said, “because-you know why. Because I’m dead, too.” He chuckled, deep down inside her stomach; she felt him quiver.
“No you’re not,” she said. “You’re as alive as I am, so don’t say that; it isn’t right.” It frightened her.
Bill said, “I was just pretending; I’m sorry. I wish I could have seen his face. How did it look?”
“Awful,” Edie said, “when you said that. It turned all inward, like a frog’s. But you wouldn’t know what a frog looks like either; you don’t know what anything looks like, so there’s no use trying to tell you.”
“I wish I could come out,” Bill said plaintively. “I wish I could be born like everybody else. Can’t I be born later on?”
“Doctor Stockstill said you couldn’t.”
“Then can’t he make it so I could be? I thought you said—”
“I was wrong,” Edie said. “I though he could cut a little round hole and that would do it, but he said no.”
Her brother, deep within her, was silent, then.
“Don’t feel bad,” Edie said. “I’ll keep on telling you how things are.” She wanted to console him; she said, “I’ll never do again like I did that time when I was mad at you, when I stopped telling you about what’s outside; I promise.”
“Maybe I could make Doctor Stockstill let me out,” Bill said.