"What?" said Ricky, snapping up his head and seeing before him Sears's beloved library: the glass-fronted bookcases, the leather chairs drawn into a circle, the dark windows. Immediately across from him, Sears drew on his cigar and gazed at him with what looked like mild annoyance. Lewis and John, holding their whiskey glasses and dressed like Sears in black tie, appeared to be more embarrassed than annoyed.
"What dream?" Ricky said, and shook his head. He too was in evening dress: by the cigar, by the quality of the darkness, by a thousand familiar details, he knew they were at the last stage of a Chowder Society meeting.
"You dozed off," John said. "Right after you finished your story."
"Story?"
"And then," Sears said, "you looked right at me and said, 'You're dead.' "
"Oh. The nightmare," Ricky said. "Oh, yes. Did I really? My goodness, I'm cold."
"At our age, we all have poor circulation," said Dr. Jaffrey.
"What's the date?"
"You really were out," Sears said, lifting his eyebrows. "It's the ninth of October."
"And is Don here? Where is Don?" Ricky looked frantically around the library, as if Edward's nephew might be hiding under a chair.
"Really, Ricky," Sears grumped. "We just voted on writing to him, if you remember. It is extremely unlikely that he should appear before the letter is written."
"We have to tell him about Eva Galli," Ricky said, remembering the vote. "It's imperative."
John smiled thinly, and Lewis leaned back in his chair, looking at Ricky as if he thought he'd lost his mind.
"You do make the most amazing reversals," Sears said. "Gentlemen, since our friend here evidently needs his sleep, perhaps we'd better call it a night."
"Sears," Ricky said, suddenly galvanized by another memory.
"Yes, Ricky?"
"Next time we meet-when we meet at John's house-don't tell the story you have in mind. You cannot tell that story. It will have the most appalling consequences."
"Stay here a moment, Ricky," Sears ordered, and showed the other two men out of the room.
He came back carrying the freshly fired-up cigar and a bottle. "You seem to need a drink. It must have been quite a dream."
"Was I out long?" He could hear, down on the street, the sound of Lewis trying to start up the Morgan.
"Ten minutes. No longer. Now what was that about my story for next time?"
Ricky opened his mouth, tried to recapture what had been so important only minutes before, and realized that he must look very foolish. "I don't know any more. Something about Eva Galli."
"I can promise you I was not going to speak about that. I don't imagine any of us ever shall, and I think that really is for the best, don't you?"
"No. No. We have to-" Ricky realized he was going to mention Donald Wanderley again, and blushed. "I suppose it must have been part of my dream. Is my window open, Sears? I'm actually freezing. And I feel so tired. I can't imagine what…"
"Age. No more or less. We're coming to the end of our span, Ricky. All of us. We've lived long enough, haven't we?"
Ricky shook his head.
"John's dying already. You can see it in his face, can't you?"
"Yes, I thought I saw…" Ricky said, thinking back to a time at the start of the meeting-a plane of darkness sliding across John Jaffrey's forehead-which now seemed to have happened years before.
"Death. That's what you thought you saw. It's true, my old friend." Sears smiled benignly at him. "I've been giving this a lot of thought, and you mentioning Eva Galli-well, it stirs it all up. I'll tell you what I've been thinking." Sears drew on the cigar and leaned massively forward. "I think Edward did not die of natural causes. I think he was given a vision of such terrible and unearthly beauty that the shock to his poor mortal system killed him. I think we have been skirting the edges of that beauty in our stories for a year."
"No, not beauty," Ricky said. "Something obscene- something terrible."
"Hold it. I want you to consider the possibility of another race of beings-powerful, all-knowing, beautiful beings. If they existed, they would detest us. We would be cattle compared to them. They'd live for centuries-for a century of centuries, so that you and I would look like children to them. They would not be bound by accident, coincidence or a blind combination of genes. They'd be right to detest us: beside them, we would be detestable." Sears stood up, put down his glass, and began to pace. "Eva Galli. That was where we missed our chance. Ricky, we could have seen things worth our pathetic lives to see."
"They're even vainer than we are, Sears," Ricky said. "Oh. Now I remember. The Bates. That's the story you can't tell."
"Oh, that's all finished now," Sears said. "Everything is finished now." He walked to Ricky, and leaned on his chair looking down at him. "I fear that from now on all of us are-is it hors commerce or de combat?"
"In your case, I am sure it is hors de combat," Ricky said, remembering his lines. He felt terribly ill, shivering, he felt the onslaught of the worst cold of his life: it lay like smoke in his lungs and weighted his arms like a winter's worth of snow.
Sears leaned toward him. "That's true for all of us, Ricky. But still, it was quite a journey, wasn't it?" Sears plugged the cigar in his mouth and reached out to palp Ricky's neck. "I thought I saw swollen glands. You'll be lucky not to die of pneumonia." Sears's massive hand circled Ricky's throat.
Helplessly, Ricky sneezed.
"Pay attention to me," David said. "Do you understand the importance of this? You put yourself in a position where the only logical end is your death. So although you consciously imagined these beings you invented as evil, unconsciously you saw that they were superior. That's why your 'story' was so dangerous. Unconsciously, according to your doctor, you saw that they were going to kill you. You invented something so superior to yourself that you wanted to give your life to them. That's dangerous stuff, kid."
Don shook his head.
David put down his knife and fork. "Let's try an experiment. I can prove to you that you want to live. Okay?"
"I know I want to live." He looked across the indisputably real street and saw the indisputably real woman walking up the other side, still tugged along by the sheepdog. No: not walking up the other side, he realized, but coming down it, as she had just come down his side. It was like a film in which the same extra is shown in different scenes, in different roles, jarring you with his presence, reminding you that this is only invention. Still, there she was, moving briskly behind the handsome dog, not an invention but part of the street.
"I'll prove it. I'm going to put my hands around your throat and choke you. When you want me to stop, just say stop."
"That's ridiculous."
David reached quickly across the table and gripped his throat. "Stop," he said. David tightened his muscles, and went up off his chair, knocking the table aside. The carafe toppled and bubbled wine over the tablecloth. None of the other diners appeared to notice, but went on eating and talking in their indisputably real way, indisputably forking food into their indisputably real mouths. "Stop," he tried to say, but now David's hands were bearing down too hard, and he could not form the word. David's face was that of a man writing a report or casting a fly: he knocked the table over with his hip.
Then David's face was not his, but the head of an antlered stag or the huge head of an owl or both of those.
Shockingly near, a man explosively sneezed.
"Hello, Peter. So you want to look behind the scenes." Clark Mulligan backed away from the door of the projection room, inviting him in. "Nice of you to bring him up, Mrs. Barnes. I don't get much company up here. What's the matter? You look sort of confused, Pete."