Out of Their Minds

6

The writing ended in the middle of the page, but there were many other pages and when I flipped the sheet over I saw that the.next page was crammed with a jumble of what appeared to be a mass of notes. Written in the crabbed calligraphy of my friend, they were jammed into the page as if the sheet of paper had been the only one he'd had and he had schemed and planned to use every inch of it to cram in his fact and observation. The notes marched in a solid phalanx down the center of the page and then the margins of the page were filled with further notes and some of the writing was so pinched and small that there would have been difficulty, in many instances, in making out the words.

I riffled through the other pages and each one was the same, filled and crammed with notes.

I flipped the pages back and clipped the note from Philip onto the front of the sheaf of pages.

Later, I told myself, I would read the notes—read them and attempt to puzzle through them. But for the moment I had read enough, far more than enough.

It was a joke, I thought—but it could not be a joke, for my old friend never joked. He did not need to joke. He was filled with gentleness and he was vastly erudite and when he talked he had more use for words than to employ them in telling stupid jokes.

And I remembered him again as he had been that last time I had seen him, sitting like a shrunken gnome in the great lounge chair which threatened to engulf him, and how he said to me, "I think that we are haunted." He had been about to tell me something that night, I was convinced, but he had not told it, for when he'd been about to tell it Philip had come in and we'd talked of something else.

I felt sure, sitting there in the motel room by the river, that he had meant to tell me what I had just read—that we are haunted by all the creatures that man has ever dreamed of, that mankind's mind has served an evolutionary function through its imagination.

He was wrong, of course. On the face of it, his belief encompassed an impossibility. But even as I thought that he must be wrong, I knew deep inside myself that no man such as he could be lightly wrong. Before he had committed to paper what he had, if for no reason than to outline his thinking for himself, he had arrived at his conclusions only after long and thoughtful study. Those pages of appended notes were not, I was certain, the only evidence he had. Rather they would be the condensation and the summary of all the evidence he'd gathered, all the thinking he had done. He still could be wrong, of course, and very likely was, but still with enough evidence and logic that his idea could not be summarily dismissed.

He had meant to tell me, to test out his theory on me, perhaps. But because of Philip's showing up, he had put it off. And it was then too late, for m a day or two he'd died, his car crumpled up and the life smashed out of him by an impact with another car that had not been found.

Thinking of it, I felt myself growing cold with a terrible kind of fear, a new kind of fear I'd never felt before—a fear that crept out of another 'world than this, that came from some far corner of an old ancestral mind many times removed, the cold, numbing, gut-squeezing fear of a man who crouched inside a cave and listened to the sound made by the ghoulish shape that was prowling in the outer dark.

Could it be, I asked myself, could it be that the mind-force of this other world of prowling things has reached such a point of development and efficiency that it could assume any shape at all, a shape for any purpose? Could it become a car that smashed another car and, having smashed it, return to that other world or dimension or invisibility from which it had emerged?

Had my old friend died because he had guessed the secret of this other world of mind-created things?

And the rattlesnakes, I wondered. No, not the rattlesnakes, for I was sure that they had been real. But had the Triceratops, the house and the other buildings, the jacked-up car beside the woodpile, Snuffy Smith and his wife not been real? Was this the answer that I needed? Could all of these things have been made up of a masquerading mind-force that lay in ambush for me, that fooled me into accepting the improbable even when I had felt it was all improbable, that had escorted me, not to the couch in the living room, but to the rocky floor of a snake-infested cave?

And if so, why? Because this hypothetical mind-force knew that the manila envelope from Philip awaited my arrival at George Duncan's store?

It was insanity, I told myself. But so had missing the turn in the road been insanity, so had been the Triceratops, so had been the house where there was no house, so had been the rattlesnakes. But not the snakes, I said, for the snakes were real. And what was real? I asked. How could one know that anything was real? At this late day, if my old friend had been right, was anything for real?

I was shaken deeper than I knew. I sat in the chair and stared at the wall, and the sheaf of papers fell from my hand and I did not move to pick them up. If this were so, I thought, our old and trustworthy world had been jerked from beneath our feet, and the goblins and the ghouls were no longer something for mere chimney-corner tales, but existed in the very solid flesh—well, not perhaps hi solid flesh, but they anyhow existed; they were not illusions. A product of imagination, we had said of them, and we had been entirely right without our knowing it. And again, if this were so, Nature, in the process of evolution, had made a long, long jump ahead, from living matter to intelligence and from intelligence to abstract thought and from abstract thought to some form of life at once shadowy and real, a life, perhaps, that could take its choice of being either shadowy or real.

I tried to imagine what sort of life it might be, what might be its joys and its sorrows, what could be its motives; I could not imagine any of it. My blood and bone and flesh would not allow me to. For it would have to be another form of life and the gap was much too great. As well, or better, to ask a trilobite to imagine the world of the dinosaurs. If Nature were seeking for survival values in its continual winnowing of species, here finally it should have found a creature (if it could be called a creature) with a fantastically high survival value, for there would be nothing, absolutely nothing, in the physical world that could get at it.

I sat there, thinking of it, and the thoughts bounced in my skull like the mutterings of distant thunder and I was getting nowhere in my thinking. I wasn't even going around in circles. I was just bouncing back and forth, like a half-demented Yo-Yo.

With an effort I jerked myself out of all this crazy thinking and once again I heard the gurgle and the laughter and the chuckling of the river as it went running down the land in the splendor of its magic.

There was unpacking to be done, getting all the bags and boxes out of the car and hauled into the room; there was fishing waiting for me, with the canoe at the dock and the big bass lurking in the reeds and among the lily pads. And after that, getting settled down, a book that must be written.

And there was, as well, I recalled, the program and the basket social at the school tonight. I would have to be there.