As the three made their way through the rear door and out onto the walkway of the outdoor park, Ruth Wolf said, “Phillips — let Rugg and me go on to the infirmary. You go out the back gate and then bring the car around to the employee parking lot. Have it waiting for us there. And hurry, Phillips. There must be a dozen cops already out here looking for him.”
Mr. Phillips nodded and hastened away, huffing and puffing down a diverging path.
Once inside the infirmary, Mr. Rugg led Miss Wolf to the room where Bubbles and Newman Trimmers sat in close grudging companionship. Mr. Rugg unlatched the cage door. One could barely discern, in the darkness, an eleven-year-old boy smiling broadly with relief, a large Boa constrictor now twined indifferently about his shoulders and under one arm.
As Newman was stepping from the cage, the three heard a loud rapping on the now locked front door to the infirmary. “Go! Hurry!” Mr. Rugg enjoined his two fellow conspirators as each glanced fearfully in the direction of the sound. “Dear boy, I will pray most fervently for your safe return.”
“Come with us, Rugg,” said Miss Wolf, taking Newman by the hand.
Mr. Rugg shook his head.“It isn’t my time yet to return. But I’ll be back someday, you may depend on it. Be off with you now.”
“Thank you,” said Newman glancing over his shoulder at the hunched little man. “I’m glad that I came to see you.”
“And I was glad to see you, my boy. It’s been years since I’ve had the good fortune to see one of my kinsmen. God go with you.” Mr. Rugg removed his eyeglasses to put a rumpled handkerchief to his moistened eyes.
There came now another series of knocks upon the door, and then the rattling sound of a key turning in the lock. Mr. Rugg hurriedly re-affixed his spectacles and led Miss Wolf and Newman into yet a third room, where the old man opened a second door — this one leading to the outside. Carefully he peeped out to make sure that it was safe for the woman and boy to proceed. Seeing no one about, he waved the two off and away. He watched as they darted behind a stand of trees and then past a collection of picnicking tables and then disappeared altogether behind a nondescript out-building.
Mr. Rugg returned to the middle room to discover three policemen in the company of young Clive Peller, the trio of law officers standing frozen in their tracks in the presence of one of the world’s largest Boa constrictors, free from her cage and moving heavily across the floor to greet them. “Mr. Rugg, you senile old fool!” bawled Junior Clive. “You’ve let Bubbles out of her cage. Holster your guns, officers. She won’t hurt you.” Clive Peller waved the three policemen over to help him lift the gentle reptilian giant back into her temporary cell. Two of the young men took a hesitant step forward, whilst the third stood quivering in a puddle of his own making.
Chapter the Sixteenth. Tuesday, June 24, 2003
us sat next to the crippled woman named Annette. The gun was now in the house-frock pocket that was closest to him, so that every now and then as she resituated herself upon the couch he could feel the hardness of the weapon against his leg.
I can bolt from this house, and more than likely she will not have sufficient time to get to the door or the window and take a good shot at me, Gus thought, but there is also the chance that a bullet from her gun will make adequate purchase with my body and I will be winged or felled or worse. I must therefore resign myself to my temporary fate and pray that this insane young Beyonder woman will keep her word and release me when her mother retires. It is not such a terrible thing to be endured, for I am learning much about the Outland through observing the moving pictures in this magic box. Does it not serve me as a true, illuminative window to this world about which I am so woefully unfamiliar?
It was now noontime and Gus and Annette were viewing a little play through the window in the box — the last in a series of plays that kept repeating the same story with different characters. The name of each of the little half-hour plays was invariably “Home Hunters,” and each new play gave a couple who, assisted by another man or woman — usually older and more nattily drest than the couple — visited a series of three prospective lodgings through which they would stroll and offer commentary. In strong Beyonder vernacular speech they would say what was good and what was bad about the rooms through which they glided. If there was a yard in the back, they would note how conducive it should be for the rompings of their children or their pet dogs. At the end of each play the couple would come to a mutual decision about what house they should like to buy. Then in the epilogue, which followed a set of interjected appeals for the purchase of various enigmatic household and food items, one would see the couple happily ensconced in their new home — the house having been freshly furnished and the kitchen counters having been newly covered with granite rock.
“It’s rather monotonous, isn’t it — this series of plays that come out of your magic television box?” asked Gus, the first words he had spoken since telling a tall man entering a room with a low ceiling to mind his head.
“It’s a ‘Home Hunters’ marathon. If you’re tired of it, we can watch something else.” Annette sneezed. She took out a little paper tissue from a cardboard box and blew her nose.
“My mother gave me her cold. This sucks. I hate being sick. So you don’t have TV in this Dingley Dell place you come from?”
Gus shook his head.
“Then what do you do for entertainment? Do people get together for laser sabre fights? Do you sit around and play holographic space chess or something? I’m trying to imagine what floats an alien’s boat.”
“I don’t come from a pretermundane place, Miss DeLove. I come from just over that ridge. Dingley Dell. It is the valley just behind those mountains. Dinglians don’t come from Mars.”
“Then why do you look the way you do? Why do you ask me what every other word I say means? Is this a crazy place — this Dingley Dell? Is it full of crazy people?”
“I’m afraid, Miss DeLove, that I can’t tell you anything about my home that you would understand, for the same reason that I am slowly coming to only a very limited understanding of the world you live in.”
Annette DeLove laughed ruefully and sneezed again and then shook her head. “It doesn’t take long for a person to understand my world. This is it. These four walls you see around you. I don’t leave this house. Just like you people don’t leave your valley — at least as a rule. We’re alike in that one big way.”
“It takes courage for us to leave our home. None of us really knows what to expect out here.”
“I guess you didn’t expect an agoraphobic cripple with a head cold waving her gun at you and forcing you to watch a ‘Home Hunters’ marathon, did you?”
“I cannot say that I did.”
“Would you like another macadamia nut cookie?”
Gus shook his head. He glanced at the television window. A significant exchange between a young house-hunting woman and a young househunting man was transpiring as follows:
YOUNG WOMAN: I hate that colour. What is it — magenta?
YOUNG MAN: We can always paint over it.
YOUNG WOMAN: I like the crown moulding, though.
YOUNG MAN: The crown moulding is nice.
YOUNG WOMAN: I think it’s fuchsia. That colour. It gags me. The older woman who is escorting the couple through the house now interposes.
OLDER WOMAN: Would you like to see the bonus room?