“By... by killing off—”
“Precisely.”
“And you think you’re going to kill Grace?”
“It’s been nineteen years since the last one for Anna,” the old man sighed. “Hasn’t it, dear?”
The doll-woman nodded. “Jasper has been luckier. He had one eight years ago.”
“You’re crazy!” Tom Martin shouted. “Both of you, you’re crazy! Grace, wake up! We’re getting out of here!” But when he leaned across the table to shake his wife awake, his legs went limp. He collapsed onto his chair. His head fell on his hands.
After a moment he was able with terrible concentration to bring the faces of Jasper and Anna Wiggin into focus again. There was something he had to remember — something he or they had said earlier, or he should have said but hadn’t...
“It won’t hurt, you know,” the old man was saying sympathetically. “You’ll both be asleep.”
“Both... both...”
“Oh, yes. We’ll have to kill you too, of course. Otherwise you’d tell.”
“Wait,” Tom whispered. The room was filling with shadows now. “Wait...”
“But it won’t be a waste, your dying. Somebody in your compartment will benefit, you know. Somebody with your birthday.”
“Birthday,” Tom repeated. That was it — birthday. “You’re wrong about Grace — about — her — birthday.” He made a supreme effort to get the words out before it was too late. “I tried — to tell you. She wasn’t born May eleventh—”
“Oh, come now, Mr. Martin,” the old man said sadly.
“No, no, it’s true! She was born May eleventh in Manila. The Philippines. Her father taught — taught college there. Different — time — zone. Don’t you see? A whole — day — different—”
The room went dark. In the darkness, though, he thought he heard the old woman begin to weep, and was sure he heard the old man saying, “Now, now, Anna, don’t do that. There will be another one before too long.”
Then nothing...
He was in the big four-poster bed when a shaft of sunlight wakened him. His wife lay asleep at his side. Their clothes were neatly folded on chairs.
Tom yawned and sat up. His wife opened her eyes and said, “Hi.”
“You know something? I don’t remember going to bed last night,” Tom said.
“Neither do I.”
“I don’t remember getting undressed or folding my clothes like that. Grace” — he was frowning now — “I never fold my clothes. You know that.”
“All I remember,” she said with a yawn, “is getting sleepy at the table.” She looked at her watch. “Anyway, we’d better be moving. It’s after nine.”
When they were ready to go they walked downstairs together, Tom carrying their suitcases. Anna Wiggin came from the parlor to greet them. “Did you sleep well?” she asked, peering into their faces.
“I’ll say we did,” Tom said.
“You were both so tired,” Anna said, nodding. “Won’t you have breakfast before you go?”
They said no, thanks, they were late as it was, and Tom took out his wallet to pay for their night’s lodging. Anna said wait, please, she would get her husband, he was out in the field. So Tom and Grace Martin went to their car with the suitcases and Tom went back into the house alone.
It came back to him when he walked into the parlor and saw the table and the tea service and the extra cups. The extra cups! At first it was fuzzy and confused; then it sharpened and he remembered everything — just as Grace had remembered everything up to the time of her falling asleep.
He snatched the sheaf of papers from the bookcase. It was indeed a manuscript, handwritten and yellowed with age. Its title was The Mathematics of Life and its author was Marek Dziok.
Under the author’s name, in a different hand, was written: Born 1613. Died (by accident) 1802.
There was a sound of footsteps in the kitchen. Tom thrust the manuscript inside his shirt and quickly stepped away from the bookcase.
“You know, I’m still sleepy,” his wife said later as their car purred along a parkway. “It must have been that house. They were nice old people, though, weren’t they?”
“Remarkable,” Tom said.
“I wonder how old they really are.”
Tom did not answer. He had already finished his figuring and now he was thinking of the pilfered manuscript inside his shirt. That, too, was remarkable. With the information it contained, a man could live a long time.
Of course, it was all pretty weird and sinister. Nevertheless...
In spite of himself, he began to think about birthdays — his wife’s and his own.
Allen Kim Lang
Murder in a Nudist Camp
The title of the story speaks for itself. But don’t jump to conclusions — EQMM has not changed its editorial policy... this is a most enjoyable story!
With one brown knee folded over the other like the knot in a pretzel, Professor Amos Cooney sprawled in his canvas chair, watching his wife’s knitting needles chew orange and black yarns into the scarf he’d unwrap, with cries of delight, on his 75th birthday dinner. Already, Professor Cooney observed with some trepidation, his neckpiece was six feet long and wide enough to conceal the Notre Dame backfield.
With a slight shudder he brought his mind back to the business at hand — the death of the manager of the PennyWise Supermarket. “We’ll send flowers in the name of the Club,” he said. “Mr. King often assisted me when I visited his store to buy our groceries.”
Spread out on cotton blankets and beach towels, and oiled like a school of Channel swimmers, lay the other members of the Spice Pond Swimming Club — a euphemism for what could more accurately be called the Spice Pond Nudist Camp. The newspaper which told of King’s death — one week after the $40,000 robbery during which he’d been shot — was crumpled beside Anne Anders’ elbow. “He was always so cheerful,” she mused. “He’d come bouncing into the Bank half an hour before the regular opening time, tell me how much money he wanted in each denomination, then chatter and kid with me so that I usually had to count it out three times. Probably I was the last person to see Mr. King before he was shot — except the murderers, of course. I visited him — Mr. King, I mean — at the hospital, but he never regained consciousness.”
“And now he’s dead,” Frank Ferguson said. “The police aren’t looking for thieves — now they’re looking for a pair of murderers.”
“They’ll never find ’em,” Jason Bailey, the newest member of the Nudist Camp, predicted. “Those eye masks—”
“Half masks, or dominoes,” Professor Cooney murmured.
“—made a good disguise,” Bailey continued, wagging his red beard. “The thieves were never identified, so they probably will never be caught. Darned shame, too.”
“Forty thousand bucks will take two men a long way from Pottawattamie, Indiana, in a week,” Frank Ferguson, Jr., thirteen years old, observed. “I’ll bet they don’t even know that Mr. King died today — or care.”
“They’ll find out,” Professor Cooney said, “when a policeman tells them. Meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen, we have a less serious matter to consider. According to Miss Toffler, our camp had an uninvited visitor this morning.”
Mary Cooney looked up from her endless scarf. “What did he look like, Tina?” she asked.