Somehow, he knew that he was far out in the country. Home was a long way off. But if he walked fast enough, he could make it before dawn. Then he'd have to get into the house without waking his parents. The doors and windows would be locked, which meant that he'd have to throw pebbles against the second-story window in the back. The rattle might wake his brother, Roosevelt.
But his brother, though only eighteen, was already a heavy drinker, a skirt chaser, roaring around on his motorcycle with his sideburned, leather-jacketed dese-and-dem pals from the Hiram Walker Distillery. This was Sunday morning, and so he'd be snoring away, filling the small attic bedroom he shared with Peter with stinking whiskey fumes.
Roosevelt was named after Theodore, not Franklin Delano, whom his father hated. James Frigate abominated "the man in the White House" and loved The Chicago Tribune, which was delivered on the doorstep every Sunday. His oldest son loathed the editorials, the whole tone of the paper, except for the comics. Ever since he had learned to read, he'd eagerly awaited every Sunday morning, right after the cocoa, pancakes, bacon, and eggs, for the adventures of Chester Gump and his pals in quest of the city of gold; Moon Mullins; Little Orphan Annie and her big Daddy Warbucks and his pals, the colossal magician Punjab and the sinister The Asp, and Mr. Am, who looked like Santa Claus, was as old as the Earth, and could travel in time. And then there was Barney Google and Smilin' Jack and Terry and the Pirates. Delightful!
And what was he doing thinking about those great comic-strip characters while walking naked along a country road in dark, wet-with-evil clouds? It wasn't difficult to figure out why. They brought a sense of warmth and security, happiness even, his belly filled with his mother's good cooking, the radio turned on low, his father sitting in the best chair reading the opinions of "Colonel Blimp." Peter would be sprawling on the living room floor with the comics page spread out before him, his mother bustling around in the kitchen feeding his two younger brothers and his infant sister. Little Jeannette, whom he loved so much and who would grow up and go through three husbands and innumerable lovers and a thousand fifths of whiskey, the curse of the Frigates.
All that was ahead, fading now from his mind, absorbed by the fog. Now he was dwelling in the front room, happy... no, it too faded away ... he was outside the house, in the backyard, naked and shivering with the cold and the terror of being caught without his clothes and no way of explaining why it happened. He was throwing pebbles against the window, hoping their rattle wouldn't wake up his little brothers and sister sleeping in the tiny bedroom below and to one side of the attic bedroom.
The house had once been a one-room country schoolhouse outside the mid-Illinois town of Peoria. But the town had grown, houses sprang up all around it, and now the city limits were a half a mile to the north. A second story and indoor plumbing had been added sometime during the growth of this area. This was the first house he had lived in in which there had been an indoor toilet. Somehow, this once-country house became the farmhouse near Mexico, Missouri. Here he, at the age of four, had lived with his mother, father, and younger brother and the family of the farmer who'd rented out two rooms to the Frigates.
His father, a civil and electrical engineer (one year in Rose Polytechnic Institute in Terre Haute, Indiana, and a diploma from the International Correspondence School) had worked for a year at the generating plant in Mexico. It was in the farmyard behind the farmhouse that Peter had been horrified on realizing that chickens ate animals and he ate chickens that ate animals. That had been the first revelation that this world was founded on cannibalism.
That was not right, he thought. A cannibal was a creature that ate its own kind. He turned over and passed back into sleep, vaguely aware that he had been half-waking between segments of this dream and mulling over each before passing on to the next. Or he had been redreaming the entire dream each time. In one night he would have the same dream several times. Or a dream would recur a number of times over several years.
The series was his specialty in dreams or in fiction. At one time, during his writing career, he had twenty-one series going. He'd completed ten of them. The others were still waiting, cliff-hangers all, when that great editor in the skies arbitrarily canceled all of them.
As in life, so in death. He could never-never? Well, hardly ever-finish anything. Hie great uncompleted. He'd first become aware of that when, a troubled youth, he had poured out his torments and anxieties onto his college freshman advisor, who also happened to be his psychology teacher.
The professor, what was his name? O'Brien? He was a short, slim youth with a fiery manner and even fierier red hair. And he always wore a bow tie.
And now Peter Jairus Frigate was walking along in the fog and there was no sound except for the hooting of a distant owl. Suddenly, a motor was roaring, two lights shone faintly ahead of him, then brightly, and the motor screamed as he screamed. He dived to one side, floating, slowly floating, while the black bulk of the automobile sped slowly toward him. As he inched through the air, his arms flailing, he turned his head toward it. Now he could see, beyond the glare of its lights, that it was a Duesenberg, the long low, classy roadster driven by Gary Grant in the movie he's seen last week, Topper. A shapeless mass sat behind the wheel, its only visible features its eyes. They were the pale-blue eyes of his German grandmother, his mother's mother, Wilhelmina Kaiser.
Then he was screaming because the car had swerved and headed directly toward him and there was no way he could escape being hit.
He woke up moaning. Eve said,sleepily, "Did you have a bad... ?" and she subsided into mumbles and a gentle snoring.
Peter got out of bed, a short-legged structure with a bamboo frame and rope supports for a mattress made of cloths magnetically attached around treated leaves. The earthen floor was covered with attached cloths. The windows were paned with the ising-glasslike intestinal membrane of the hormfish. Their squares shone faintly with the reflected light from the night sky.
He stumbled to the door, opened it, walked outside, and urinated. Rain still dripped from the thatched roof. Through a pass in the hills, he could see a fire blazing under the roof of a sentinel tower. It outlined the form of a guard leaning on the railing and looking down The River. The flames also shone on the masts and rigging of a boat he had never seen before. The other guard wasn't on the tower, which meant that he would be down by the boat. He'd be questioning the boat's skipper. It must be all right, since there were no alarm drums beating.
Back in bed, he considered the dream. Its chronology was mixed up, which was par for dreams. For one thing, in 1937, brother Roosevelt had been only sixteen. The motorcycle, the distillery job, and the peroxided blondes were still two years away. The family wasn't even living in that house anymore. It had moved to a newer, larger house a few blocks away.
There was that amorphous, sinister dark mass in the car, the thing with his grandmother's eyes. What did that mean? It wasn't the first time he had been horrified by a black hooded thing with Grandma Kaiser's almost colorless blue eyes. Nor the first time he'd tried to figure out why she appeared in such horrendous guise.
He knew that she had come from Galena, Kansas to Terre Haute to help his mother take care of him just after he'd been born. His mother had told him that his grandmother had also taken care of him when he was five. He didn't remember, however, ever seeing her before the age of twelve, when she had come to this house for a visit. But he was convinced that she had done something awful to him when he was an infant. Or it was something which had seemed awful. Yet she was a kindly old lady, though inclined to get hysterical. Nor did she have any control at all over her daughter's children when they were left in her care.