«Oh, not a stranger really. You’ll never be a stranger. Don’t you understand? You are one of us. There was an empty place and you’ve filled it. And you’ll be here forever. You’ll never go away.»
«You mean that no one ever leaves?»
«We try. All of us have tried. More than once for some of us. But we’ve never made it. Where is there to go?»
«Surely there must be someplace else. Some way to get back.»
«You don’t understand,» she said. «There is no place but here. All the rest is wilderness. You could get lost if you weren’t careful. There have been times when we’ve had to go out and hunt down the lost ones.»
Underwood came across the room and sat down on the sofa on the other side of Enid.
«How are you two getting on?» he said.
«Very well,» said Enid. «I was just telling David there’s no way to get away from here.»
«That is fine,» said Underwood, «but it will make no difference. There’ll come a day he’ll try.»
«I suppose he will,» said Enid, «but if he understands beforehand, it will be easier.»
«The thing that rankles me,» said Latimer, «is why. You said at the dinner table everyone tries for a solution, but no one ever finds one.»
«Not exactly that,» said Underwood. «I said there are some theories. But the point is that there is no way for us to know which one of them is right. We may have already guessed the reason for it all, but the chances are we’ll never know. Enid has the most romantic notion. She thinks we are being held by some super-race from some far point in the galaxy who want to study us. We are specimens, you understand. They cage us in what amounts to a laboratory, but do not intrude upon us. They want to observe us under natural conditions and see what makes us tick. And under these conditions, she thinks we should act as civilized as we can manage.»
«I don’t know if I really think that,» said Enid, «but it’s a nice idea. It’s no crazier than some of the other explanations. Some of us have theorized that we are being given a chance to do the best work we can. Someone is taking all economic pressure off us, placing us in a pleasant environment, and giving us all the time we need to develop whatever talents we may have. We’re being subsidized.»
«But what good would that do?» asked Latimer. «I gather we are out of touch with the world we knew. No matter what we did, who is there to know?»
«Not necessarily,» said Underwood. «Things disappear. One of Alice’s compositions and one of Dorothy’s novels and a few of Enid’s poems.»
«You think someone is reaching in and taking them? Being quite selective?»
«It’s just a thought,» said Underwood. «Some of the things we create do disappear. We hunt for them and we never find them.»
Jonathon came back with the drinks. «We’ll have to settle down now,» he said, «and quiet all this chatter. Alice is about to play. Chopin, I believe she said.»
It was late when Latimer was shown to his room by Underwood, up on the third floor. «We shifted around a bit to give this one to you,» said Underwood. «It’s the only one that has a skylight. You haven’t got a straight ceiling—it’s broken by the roofline—but I think you’ll find it comfortable.»
«You knew that I was coming, then, apparently some time before I arrived.»
«Oh, yes, several days ago. Rumors from the staff; the staff seems to know everything. But not until late yesterday did we definitely know when you would arrive.»
After Underwood said good night, Latimer stood for a time in the center of the room. There was a skylight, as Underwood had said, positioned to supply a north light.
Standing underneath it was an easel, and stacked against the wall were blank canvases. There would be paint and brushes, he knew, and everything else that he might need. Whoever or whatever had sucked him into this place would do everything up brown; nothing would be overlooked.
It was unthinkable, he told himself, that it could have happened. Standing now, in the center of the room, he still could not believe it. He tried to work out the sequence of events that had led him to this house, the steps by which he had been lured into the trap, if trap it was—and on the face of the evidence, it had to be a trap. There had been the realtor in Boston who had told him of the house in Wyalusing. «It’s the kind of place you are looking for,» he had said. «No near neighbors, isolated. The little village a couple of miles down the road. If you need a woman to come in a couple of times a week to keep the place in order, just ask in the village. There’s bound to be someone you could hire. The place is surrounded by old fields that haven’t been farmed in years and are going back to brush and thickets. The coast is only half a mile distant. If you like to do some shooting, come fall there’ll be quail and grouse. Fishing, too, if you want to do it.»
«I might drive up and have a look at it,» he had told the agent, who had then proceeded to give him the wrong directions, putting him on the road that would take him past this place. Or had he? Had it, perhaps, been his own muddleheadedness that had put him on the wrong road? Thinking about it, Latimer could not be absolutely certain. The agent had given him directions, but had they been the wrong directions? In the present situation, he knew that he had the tendency to view all prior circumstances with suspicion. Yet, certainly, there had been some psychological pressure brought, some misdirection employed to bring him to this house. It could not have been simple happenstance that had brought him here, to a house that trapped practitioners of the arts. A poet, a musician, a novelist, and a philosopher—although, come to think of it, a philosopher did not seem to exactly fit the pattern. Maybe the pattern was more apparent, he told himself, than it actually was. He still did not know the professions of Underwood, Charlie, and Jane. Maybe, once he did know, the pattern would be broken.
A bed stood in one corner of the room, a bedside table and a lamp beside it. In another corner three comfortable chairs were grouped, and along a short section of the wall stood shelves that were filled with books. On the wall beside the shelves hung a painting. It was only after staring at it for several minutes that he recognized it. It was one of his own, done several years ago.
He moved across the carpeted floor to confront the painting. It was one of those to which he had taken a special liking—one that, in fact, he had been somewhat reluctant to let go, would not have sold it if he had not stood so much in need of money.
The subject sat on the back stoop of a tumbledown house. Beside him, where he had dropped it, was a newspaper folded to the ‘Help Wanted’ ads.
From the breast pocket of his painfully clean, but worn, work shirt an envelope stuck out, the gray envelope in which welfare checks were issued.
The man’s work-scarred hands lay listlessly in his lap, the forearms resting on the thighs, which were clad in ragged denims. He had not shaved for several days and the graying whiskers lent a deathly gray cast to his face.
His hair, in need of barbering, was a tangled rat’s nest, and his eyes, deep-set beneath heavy, scraggly brows, held a sense of helplessness. A scrawny cat sat at one corner of the house, a broken bicycle leaned against the basement wall. The man was looking out over a backyard filled with various kinds of litter, and beyond it the open countryside, a dingy gray and brown, seared by drought and lack of care, while on the horizon was the hint of industrial chimneys, gaunt and stark, with faint wisps of smoke trailing from them.
The painting was framed in heavy gilt—not the best choice, he thought, for such a piece. The bronze title tag was there, but he did not bend to look at it. He knew what it would say:
UNEMPLOYED
David Lloyd Latimer