Maggie was sitting close to the proscenium, watching a noisy powerboat race, but she was almost hidden from his view by a pile of cartons and boxes, most of which had been opened. In the first seconds he picked out three new table lamps, a gilt-framed painting which looked like a Renoir, several of the recently developed four-legged turkeys in polythene skins, a salon-type hair drier, numerous hat boxes, and a de luxe Micropedia Britannica complete with reclining chair and ceiling projector.
Ted was unable to suppress a plaintive whimpering sound as he forced his way into the room. “You bitch,” he moaned. “You faithless bitch.”
“What did you say, honey?” Maggie twisted a knob on the handset and the sound of the jockeying speedboats faded away. She wheeled her chair round to face Ted and he saw the Telemart brochure was open on her knees.
“What do you think you’re doing, Maggie? They don’t give this stuff away, you know—our bank account is automatically debited every time you press that button.”
Maggie shrugged. “I’ve been enjoying myself—which makes a nice change. Ted, honey, you really should look at this brochure. You don’t have to buy just what they show you in the commercials—Telemart offers all kind of services I never dreamed …’ She stopped speaking as he picked up one of the turkeys and hurled it at the vista of boats beyond the proscenium arch. The bird passed through a red boat, hit the wall of the room and bounced back out on to the floor.
“I’m going to kill you,” Ted announced. “I’m a fair-minded man, and I don’t like the idea of killing you, but you give me no choice.”
“You’ve been drinking!”
“I’m cold sober.” He looked around the room, selected one of the new table lamps and removed its ornate shade, leaving himself with a serviceable blunt instrument.
Maggie clutched the Telemart’s handset to her bosom in a strangely protective gesture. “Don’t come near me!”
“In a way I blame myself,” Ted said sadly, hefting the base of the lamp. “I should have known you weren’t ready for the responsibilities of marriage.” He stepped over a cluster of perfume bottles and swung downwards at Maggie’s head. She twisted away from the lamp and it crunched into the back of the wheelchair, tipping it over. Maggie went sprawling among the hat boxes. Breathing heavily, Ted stood over her and raised the base with both hands, noting with one part of his mind that she was still holding the handset and was, in fact, twisting a red knob on it. Poor mindless lump, he thought as he brought the club down.
“Drop it right there, fellow,” a voice said close behind him. Ted spun and saw a hard-faced young man in a grey suit stepping down from the truncated catwalk attached to the proscenium. The stranger was holding an automatic pistol.
“Who … ?”Ted’s voice faltered as he tried to grasp the enormity of what was happening. “What is this?”
The stranger smiled unpleasantly. “You can’t have studied the section of the Telemart brochure covering our new Three Star Protection Service for clients’ lives and property.”
“Protection?”
“Yes. As soon as we get an emergency signal a trained security man who is on duty at the station is instantaneously transmitted into the home—and in this case I’d say I made it just in time.”
‘But they can’t do that!” Ted had an overpowering sense of outrage. “After a while there’d be hundreds of duplicates of you running about the city. Telemart can’t go around creating extra people—we’re overpopulated as it is.”
A shadow crossed the stranger’s face. “That’s taken care of. They deliberately programme a flaw into the haemoglobin structure of any duplicates they have to transmit. A massive embolism will kill me in a few hours. It’s a hell of a prospect.” The stranger raised his right hand and levelled the pistol.
“Just a minute,” Ted said desperately. “There must be some arrangement we can come to. I’ve got money …’
The stranger regarded him with cold, tortured eyes. “What good is money to a duplicate like me? I’ve got a short life, and all I can do is make it as gay as possible.”
He aimed the pistol right between Ted’s eyes, and pulled the trigger.
Invasion of Privacy
“I saw Granny Cummins again today,” Sammy said through a mouthful of turnip and potato.
May’s fork clattered into her plate. She turned her head away, and I could see there were tears in her eyes. In my opinion she had always been much too deeply attached to her mother, but this time I could sympathise with her—there was something about the way the kid had said it.
“Listen to me, Sammy.” I leaned across the table and gripped his shoulder. “The next time you make a dumb remark like that I’ll paddle your backside good and hard. It wasn’t funny.”
He gazed at me with all the bland defiance a seven-year-old can muster. “I wasn’t trying to be funny. I saw her.”
“Your granny’s been dead for two weeks,” I snapped, exasperated both at him and at May, who was letting the incident get too far under her skin. Her lips had begun to tremble.
“Two weeks,” Sammy repeated, savouring the words. He had just discovered sarcasm and I could tell by his eyes he was about to try some on. “If she’d only been dead two days it woulda been all right, I suppose. But not two weeks, eh?” He rammed a huge blob of creamed potato into his mouth with a flourish.
“George!” May’s brown eyes were spilling as she looked at me and the copper strands of her hair quivered with anger. “Do something to that child! Make him drop dead.”
“I can’t Smack him for that, hon,” I said reasonably. “The kid was only being logical. Remember in Decline and Fall where a saint got her head chopped off, then was supposed to get up and walk a mile or so to the burial ground, and religious writers made a great fuss about the distance she’d covered, and Gibbon said in a case like that the distance wasn’t the big thing—it was the taking of the first step? Well …’ I broke off as May fled from the table and ran upstairs. The red sunlight of an October evening glowed on her empty chair, and Sammy continued eating.
“See what you’ve done?” I rapped his blond head with my knuckles, but not sharply enough to hurt. I’m letting you off this time—for the last time—but I can’t let you go on upsetting your mother with a stupid joke. Now cut it out.”
Sammy addressed the remains of his dinner. “I wasn’t joking. I … saw … Granny … Cummins.”
“She’s been dead and buried for …’ I almost said two weeks again, but stopped as an expectant look appeared on his face. He was quite capable of reproducing the same sarcasm word for word. “How do you explain that?”
“Me?” A studied look of surprise. “I can’t explain it. I’m just telling you what I seen.”
“All right—where did you see her?”
“In the old Guthrie place, of course.”
Of course, I thought with a thrill of something like nostalgia. Where else? Every town, every district in every city, has its equivalent of the old Guthrie place. To find it, you simply stop any small boy and ask him if he knows of a haunted house where grisly murders are committed on a weekly schedule and vampires issue forth at night. I sometimes think that if no suitable building existed already the community of children would create one to answer a dark longing in their collective mind. But the building is always there—a big, empty, ramshackle place, usually screened by near-black evergreens, never put up for sale, never pulled down, always possessing a “Bal immunity to property developers. And in the small town where I live the old Guthrie house was the one which filled the bill. I hadn’t really thought about it since childhood, but it looked just the same as ever—dark, shabby and forbidding—and I should have known it would have the same associations for another generation of kids. At the mention of the house Sammy had become solemn and I almost laughed aloud as I saw myself, a quarter of a century younger, in his face.