The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

THE SOMEWHERE DOORS Fred Chappell

No true light yet showed in the window, but he could feel the dawn coming on, the softness of it brushing his neck hair like a whisper, and heard the stir of trees outside the screen of his open window. He sat staring at the paper before him, the Blue Horse page he had so painstakingly covered with his light slant strokes, and held his pen poised above it, ready to write the final line of his story.

Here was his keenest pleasure, writing down at last the sentence he had aimed at from the beginning. It was like drawing the line beneath a column of numbers and setting in the sum, a feeling not only of winding up but of full completion. He waited, savoring the moment, then inscribed the words: “Lixor looked at the lights in the sky and wondered if one of them would begin to move toward him.” And then, to prolong his satisfaction, he printed THE END below in tall, graceful capitals embellished with curls of flourish. Reverting to his careful script, he put down also his name: Arthur Strakl, Cherry Cove, North Carolina, September 12, 1936.

When he looked at his handiwork, his name seemed strange to him, out of place on this page full of exotic sights and notions, as homely alien as a worn tin thimble in a jeweler’s fancy display case. So he set about inking the postscript out, producing a shiny black rectangle where each word had stood. The page looked better, he thought, without this reminder of our world of familiar impressions and of a dispiriting time in a place that was all too local. Anyhow, he would see his name enough times when “The Marooned Aldebaran” was published.

If it was published.

His luck was not good. Only about three of ten of the stories that he wrote ever saw print, and then in so mutilated a fashion, so mangled by editorial obtuseness, that he felt a sad weariness when they did appear.

He went to his one bookcase and took up a copy of a recent Astounding Stories from an unread stack of similar pulp magazines. It was the August issue, and commenced The Incredible Invasion, a serial novel by Murray Leinster. Names familiar to habitues of this kind of literature were displayed: Weinbaum, Fearn, Schachner, Gallun, and Williamson. The cover illustration showed grim homi-noids in gleaming gray armor battling among themselves and menacing a brace of plucky young ladies in dapper short skirts. He supposed the armored men to be the Incredible Invaders. Arthur did not read invasion stories; he could not imagine that Earth, unfashionable and located far from its galactic center, would be a desirable prize.

We are, he reflected, a bunch of hicks. Why would anyone bother?

Opening the magazine, he flipped past the ads for self-education and selfmedication, but his attention was drawn to the announcement for a new character pulp, The Whisperer. “The Whisperer!—NOT a Chinaman!—NOT a modern Robin Hood!—NOT a myth or a ghost!—But—HE IS-a good two-fisted, hard-hitting AMERICAN cop who gets his man!”

Arthur sighed, thinking how he could never write a story about The Whisperer, how in fact he probably could never bring himself to read one. He had tried to write some of those stories about two-fisted cops, two-fisted cowboys, two-fisted orphans of the jungle male and female, but that talent was not in him—nor for flying aces, nor scientific detectives, nor steel-armed quarterbacks or boxers. Again it was a question of belief. He did not believe that human beings came from so predictable a toy box and he could not engage himself in heroic fantasies. To him those daydreams lacked imagination and verged upon braggartry. But he did not wish to condemn. Hard times now, and writers needed to stock groceries, and readers wished to enjoy the brief glimpses of triumph the pulp stories afforded.

But his own stories were not fashioned in that mode. He could write only these melancholy twilight visions of things distant in time and space, stories that seemed not entirely his, but gifts or visitations from a source at which he could not guess. His most difficult task was to find words for them; he was a shy man, naturally taciturn, and he considered himself unhandy with language. But when the stories came to him, the impulse to write them down was too strong to resist. The stories compelled him to write, to struggle with phrases in a way that felt incongruous to his personality. And so he wrote, stealing the hours from his bed, the strength from his body. Each stroke of the pen, every noun and comma and period, brought him closer to the beautiful release that he always felt, as he did now, upon completion of a tale.

That was the main thing, to finish, to tell the stories through to the end. He got not much money for them and what he received was always late in arriving, and little acclaim came his way, for the readers who wrote to the letter columns preferred the loud, brawny stories of superscience, with their whirling rays and burning cities, colliding suns and flaming rocket ships, to his delicate accounts of loneliness under the stars, his elegies for dying worlds and soulful perishing species. Of course, his stories as they appeared were mutilated so that readers could not form fair opinions about them, but Arthur suspected that even if they were published just as they came in their final drafts from his typewriter, with every nuance and adverb complete, readers still would prefer the yarns about genius engineers and iron-thewed swordsmen.

He replaced the magazine on top of the stack and paced the narrow strip of floor between his desk and the foot of his lumpy bed. He was too elated to sleep and, anyway, the night was nearly gone. A dim gray began to show in the window. He would go to his job at the Red Man Cafe red-eyed and nervous and in the afternoon a dull lassitude would creep over him and he would drink cup after cup of acid coffee until closing time. He was “chief cook and bottle washer,” as the owner, Farley Redmon, called him, and his hours were long and ill paid. But he earned his food and his rent for this little outbuilding that was formerly a tool shed—and he had a job and in this year of Our Lord 1936, he was grateful for it.

He would be grateful to light down anywhere he could find in order to write these stories that gave him no peace.

Arthur decided to walk out. The excitement of composition was still warm in him and the hour was inviting, cool and quiet. He pulled on his thinning blue wool sweater and peered out his window and, seeing no lights in any of the settlement windows, departed his room, taking care to turn off the little desk lamp with its green cardboard shade.

Cherry Cove was quiet, almost silent: no dogs barking, no radios in kitchens reporting farm prices, no clatter of breakfast cutlery. Everyone snug and warm and dreaming and, as he walked along the broad gravel road that led east, Arthur wondered whether any of their dreams might be as strange as the one he had just set down, in which the last survivor of a race of orchidaceous philosophers journeyed to the moon of its planet in order to send a signal to the cosmos, a message telling them that though the Kronori had died all but Lixor, he had one valuable secret to share with every other species everywhere.

Arthur smiled, assuring himself that the dreams of his neighbors would be stranger and more exciting and more urgent than his little tale. Then he set out at an easy walking pace for the Little Tennessee River two miles distant, the river that ran counter to all the others.

He was headed toward the peeling iron bridge. He had no particular purpose in mind, drawn only by that obscure impulse that leads us to the sound of running water as a source of comfort and refreshment. When he stood there at the railing, listening to the water twenty feet below rush away over the rocks—going the wrong way, for the Little Tennessee is a backwards river—his anxieties fell quiet and the utter lack of hope that characterized his days took on the aspect of courage rather than of fear. Arthur Strakl often felt that he stood on the abrupt edge of an ebony abyss, and that if he fell he would fall without crying out, without making a sound, and that no one on earth would remark his passing or remember that he had sojourned here. These considerations sometimes made him gloomy; at other times they strengthened his resolve, and did so now, with the completion of “The Marooned Aldebaran” fresh in his mind. He listened to the water and smelled its clean smell and watched where the river drew away into the forest of firs and oaks. On his right-hand side, just at the bridgehead, was a stand of slender trees with flowers beneath, and he glanced at it without really seeing it.

Then he became aware that he was not alone on the bridge. A woman stood beside him. He had not heard her approach, but he was not startled; her aspect was calm and easy. He was surprised to see that she was dressed in a white silk party frock with a wide square collar. She wore white pumps of patent leather and her dark hair was tied back with a broad ribbon of shiny white silk.

She was a beautiful woman, and when she spoke, it was with a quiet musical accent that was stranger than any other he had ever heard. “Are you Arthur Strakl?” she asked.

“Yes ma’am,” he said, though she was not his elder. She looked rather younger than Arthur’s thirty-five years.

“I’m glad,” she said, and said no more for such a long moment that he began to think the conversation had ended. Then she added, “To meet you. I’m glad to meet you.”

“I’m glad to meet you, too. You don’t live in Cherry Cove, do you?”

“No,” she said. “I’ve come a long way to find you.”

“Me?” He laughed. “Well now, that’s a little hard to believe.”

“Why is it hard to believe?”

Arthur noted that she spoke slowly and hesitantly, as if these words were foreign to her. “There’s no good reason for anyone to look for me. I don’t have a family or any close friends. No one knows who I am.”

“Are you not Arthur Strakl, the author?”

“I write a few odd stories. I never thought of calling myself an author.”

“But didn’t you write ‘In the Titanic Deeps,’ the story about sea dwellers in another galaxy?”

“Yes. My title was ‘Blind Oceans,’ but they changed it. That one was about the great worms that lived on the bottom of an ocean. They were suffering because they had the power to foresee centuries into the future and saw that nothing would change, that their destiny was fixed. Then one of their mathematicians devised a theory that admitted the possibility of the end of time, and this idea brought solace to them.”

“And then what happened?”

“Nothing,” he said. “That was it. . . . Well, their music changed.”

She turned upon him a superbly friendly smile. Dawn brightened over the river below them. “Yes,” she said. “Their music changed.”

“I’m amazed,” he said. “You can’t imagine. This is the first time I ever met somebody who has read one of my stories.”

“Oh, I’ve read many of your stories. I remember them all.”

“Well, I actually haven’t published all that many.”

“I remember your story about the beings you called ‘kindlers.’ They were incandescent blue nervous systems that lived on the surface of a faraway sun. I remember the planet you called Zephlar, where the wind streaming over a continent of telepathic grasses produced an unending silent musical fugue. I remember your city Alphega, which was an enormous machine that was writing a book; each word of the book was a living human citizen. I remember your story about the language you named Spranza, which communicated so efficiently that listeners experienced directly the objects and actions it spoke of. And the sentient river Luvulio that had become a religious zealot, and the single amber eye named Ull, which lay in a primordial sea waiting for the remainder of its organism to evolve, and the parasite that reproduced itself by causing allergies in its hosts. At the magnetic pole of a tropical planet grew a tree whose leaves were mirrors; there was a world where humanlike people communicated by differences in skin temperature. There was a plague virus that heightened the sense of taste to a painful degree.” “Good Lord,” Arthur said.

“So you see,” she said sweetly, “I have read your stories. They have afforded me”—she paused, as if waiting for the correct phrase to present itself—“a fine pleasure. Many fine pleasures.”

“Thank you for saying so,” Arthur said. “But I didn’t write all those stories. Somebody else must have written about the religious river and the alphabet city. And none of the magazines would take my story about the telepathic grasses. I don’t see how you could have heard about that one.”

“You have more admirers than you’re aware of,” she said. She smiled and turned away to watch the early light smear tree shadows on the river surface. “Sometimes the editors talk about your stories even when they don’t buy them. Sometimes they want to buy them and are afraid to. But word gets around.” “Well, you obviously know a great deal about this,” he said. “What do you do for a living? I mean, are you a literary agent?”

“I’m a representative for a group of people who are interested in new ideas,” she said. “They have great faith in the power of ideas to make the future better for everyone.”

“Who are they?”

She turned to meet his gaze directly. Her brown eyes were serious. “They prefer to remain anonymous.”

“Are they Communists then?” he asked. “I met a Communist once who talked like that, sort of.”

She laughed lightly. “I don’t think they belong to any recognizable political group. ... To tell the truth, I don’t know all that much about them. They just pay me to deliver messages to people they think are important to their way of looking at things.”

“And I’m important to them?”

“Oh yes,” she said, and there was no mistaking the sincerity of her reply. “Extremely important. They're very pleased to discover you. That’s why they sent me to trace you down.”

“How did you find out where I live?”

“It wasn’t hard. You are a publishing author, after all.” She laughed again, and the light sound reminded Arthur of a child’s laughter.

He found himself smiling. “Only a few people know about that.”

“But it’s not how many,” she said. “It’s who they are.”

“And these are important people?”

“I don’t know anything about them,” she said, “but they seem to have decided that they’re important. ”

“So now you know who I am, but I don’t know who you are.”

“I’m not supposed to tell my real name. I was supposed to choose any name that I took a fancy to. Do I look like a Francesca?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen any Francescas.”

“So this must be exciting for you.” She offered her hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Arthur.”

He held it for a moment. “I’m pleased to meet you, too. May I ask about the way you’re dressed? Or is that against the rules?”

“Oh, this,” she said. “Of course. I came from a dinner party that went on till too late, so then I came straight here.”

“Straight here to this bridge?”

“Yes.”

Confused, he could not formulate the question he wanted to ask. “How did you get here?”

“My driver dropped me off,” she said, and hurried on to add, “and the car will be returning for me very soon. So I’d better go ahead and deliver my message.” “From these unknown people?”

“Yes.” She laughed again and now there was something teasing in the sound— teasing but not mocking. “Yes, my message that I don’t understand from a group of people I don’t know. . . . This doesn’t really make sense, does it?”

“No,” he said. “But I don’t much care. A lot of things don’t make sense to me.” “I’ll bet you like it better that way.”

“I do.” His tone changed. “I sure do wish you lived around here. Are you married?”

She reached gently to touch his face with two fingers. “You’re sweet. Truly. It’s very sweet of you to say that. But I live far away and our time is short. I’d better tell you what I came to say.”

“All right.” He grinned. “Fire when ready.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. “Two doors will be brought to you. Don’t be afraid. These doors open to other worlds, worlds different from our own. Behind the blue door is a world that has no people in it. The violet door is the entrance to a world of great cities. You can live in either world very pleasantly, but once you choose either door, you can never return. You will be gone from this planet forever. ”

“Wait. I don’t understand.”

“It’s no good asking me,” she said. “I don’t understand, either. I can only tell you what I was told.”

“Did they send a letter?” he asked. “I’d like to read it.”

“It was a telephone message and the voice sounded like it came from a long way off. I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman speaking. ”

“Is that all then? Two doors?”

She closed her eyes once more, appearing to recollect, then went on: “The two doors will be brought to you at some future date. It may be soon, or it may be quite some time from now. And things may happen so that you think the doors never will arrive. But they will.”

“Where will I find them?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“All right. What else?”

“Nothing else.”

“That’s all?”

“As far as I can think, that’s the end of the message. I hope I haven’t forgotten anything. . . . Oh, don’t look so alarmed. I’m sure I haven’t.”

“I honestly don’t know what to make of all this.”

“Neither do I,” she replied, smiling her fine smile once more. “I’m just glad I don’t have to make sense of it.—Wait. Now I remember. There was one other thing. You must keep writing your wonderful stories. That is the most important thing. You must keep on imagining the kinds of things that only you can imagine.” “All right. I wish I could sell more of them, though. I could use the money.” “I’m sorry. The person I talked to didn’t say anything about that. But I’m sure you’ll do well.—Oh, here comes my ride.” She raised her right arm and waved.

He turned, to see that the car was at the end of the bridge, by the stand of birches there, rolling very slowly toward them, almost silent on the gravel. That was strange, and the car was strange, too, with its darkened windows and its smooth, almost featureless sedan shape and its deep oxblood color. There was something dreamlike about its appearance as it came on slowly.

When it drew abreast of them, it stopped and the passenger door opened— seemingly of its own accord—and the girl got in easily, showing neat ankles and pulling her skirt over her knees. He leaned down, trying to see the driver, but the car was in shadow on that side.

“Goodbye, Arthur,” she said. Her tone was grave now and she didn’t smile.

“I suppose I won’t see you again.”

“No,” she said. “Never again.”

“I hate it,” he said. “I wish—”

“No. Say goodbye.”

“All right. . . . Goodbye.” He sighed.

And she closed the door and the strange smooth car pulled away, the sound of its motor no more than a warm hum and soon lost in the normal sounds of an autumn morning by the water: birdcalls and squirrels frolicking and the wash and gurgle of the river. He watched the car till it floated out of sight around the tall bank of the road all yellow and red with locust and sassafras bushes.

Two years passed and Arthur Strakl waited patiently. He had a serene confidence that the two doors, the doors that opened upon different Somewheres, would be brought to him. He did not know why he was so secure in his faith; he was not introspective in that particular way. The fancies that his mind produced entranced him, but the workings of his mind held no interest.

Not much changed. His employer, Farley Redmon, had undertaken to make his hut a little more comfortable, paying to have it plumbed and rewired. But he explained that he could not increase Arthur’s wages and Arthur accepted the statement, his needs few. His heaviest expenses outside basic necessities were his pulp magazines and typewriter ribbons and now and again some small fees for the repair of the ancient Underwood. He was healthy and lucky.

For he kept on writing his stories, just as he had promised, and he was beginning to have a brighter success with them. He was still no great favorite with readers, but their letters now spoke of his work with intrigued bemusement rather than with irritated incomprehension. He appeared more regularly in the magazines and now and then his name would be featured on the cover, tucked away in the corner of the pictured insane laboratory where the flimsily clothed girl stared in horror at some loathsome transformation.

His better satisfaction, though, was that editors began to do less violence to his sentences. His style of writing was still hobbledehoy, he thought, but it was better left alone than improved. At least something of the intensity of his visions flamed through, even if sensual nuance was lost. The essential strangeness of the tales did not diminish. He wrote, for instance, a story based on the idea that the positions of the stars in our galaxy had been designed by the immensely powerful science of an ancient superrace as a kind of wallpaper. In another story the ghost of a dismantled robot visited its inventor and sat each night silent and reproachful at the foot of his bed. In “Black Receiver” an intelligent butterfly composed of a carbon gas picked up through its antennae the radio communications of a space fleet and thus formed a very surprising view of humankind.

So he was fairly content and hoped for better things to come, even though it was clear that the times were verging on catastrophe. Arthur was no great reader of newspapers, but no one could escape hearing about the events in Europe, and all the world was darkened by suspicion.

Arthur’s own apprehensiveness deepened when he was visited by a man who claimed to be a government agent and asked whether he knew Sheila Weddell. “I don’t think so,” he said. “The name doesn’t ring a bell.”

The agent gave him a long stare. Then he said, “All right, sport. I’ll have coffee.”

When Arthur set the thick mug before him, the squat little man added cream and three spoons of sugar before saying, “You sure?”

“Sure of what?”

“About the woman. Sheila Weddell.”

“I don’t know her.” He knew, however, that he didn’t like this dumpy little man with his false smile that let the sneer show through and his slicked-back silver-blond hair. He had a firm impression of the fellow as one who took deep satisfaction in feeling contempt. His bored eyes and twisted mouth betrayed a jaded spirit.

“I got a picture.” He reached into his inside jacket pocket and produced a crinkled photograph.

The picture, as Arthur had expected, was of the woman who called herself Francesca, and he already had decided to keep this agent—if that’s what he was— at arm’s length. “Pretty,” he said, and handed it back.

The man laid it carefully on the Bakelite counter, then turned it around to face Arthur. “You’ve seen her before, haven’t you? About two years ago?”

“Two years is a long time.”

“It’s longer inside the jailhouse than it is outside. Even in a fleabite place like this.” He giggled. “What do you call it here? Cherry Cola?”

“Cherry Cove,” Arthur said. “You’re in Cherry Cove, North Carolina.”

“And I want to know if you ain’t seen this woman, Sheila Weddell, in Cherry Cove, North Carolina, about two years ago.”

“You say you’re some kind of an agent? I’d like to see your identification.”

He drew a toothpick from an upper vest pocket and stuck it in the front of his mouth, so it bobbed up and down as he spoke. “You know, sport, I don’t think you’d be asking for identification unless you were trying to hide something. I got me an idea you’re hiding something.”

“And I have an idea you’re no government agent of any kind,” Arthur said. “I have an idea you’re a lawyer or a Pinkerton who is meddling in a lady’s private affairs.”

“I see. You kinda like her, do you? Well, let me tell you, you don’t know what’s going on. You don’t know the least little thing. If you did, you wouldn’t be calling Sheila Weddell no lady. I guess she must have been real nice to you, am I right?” “You better leave now,” Arthur said. “Your coffee is cold and we have just run fresh out.”

“Sure, I understand,” the oily blond man said. “She let you have a piece and you think you’re Sir Galahad or somebody. But, brother, if you knew what I know ...”

“Since you’re a government agent, you’ll be glad to talk to Robie Calkins. He is our sheriff here in Jackson County. Would you like to wait here for him? I’ll give him a call right now.”

“That’s all right. I believe I’ve already found out what I needed to know. It’s pretty clear she passed through here two years back.” He laid a nickel on the counter and pushed it toward Arthur with one finger. “Here’s what I owe.” Arthur pushed it back. “Keep it,” he said. “I don’t believe the coffee agreed with you.”

The man smiled his twisted smile but did indeed rescue his nickel and make his surprisingly quick way to the door with an odd waddling stride. Arthur expected him to stop at the door and turn and make a last curdled remark, but he only pushed the screen open and stepped out into the late September sunlight that streamed saffron through the leaves of the big poplar there.

Arthur sighed tiredly and looked up and down the long room with its empty tables covered with red oilcloth and the big iron coal stove in the center of the aisle and the long counter with the five stools before it. When he emptied the remains of the coffee into the zinc sink behind him, he saw that his hands were shaking. He washed his hands and dried them on his apron and headed toward the storeroom in back to sit down and collect himself for a moment.

But Farley Redmon opened the kitchen door and called him back. “Arthur,” he said, “could I talk to you just a minute?”

“Sure thing.” He retraced his steps and when the older man held the door for him, he entered the kitchen.

“Sit down,” Redmon said, indicating a tall wooden stool by the chop block. When Arthur sat, Redmon leaned back against the wall counter and folded his arms. “What was that all about with the little stout feller that come in?”

“I don’t know,” Arthur said. “He was asking questions about a woman I met one time.”

“You got woman trouble, Arthur? Hard to believe.”

“I’ve got an outstanding lack of woman trouble,” he said. “It’s hard for me to add up how much woman trouble I don’t have.”

“Ain’t that kind of burdensome?”

“I just hope it’s not fatal.”

“Generally it ain’t,” Redmon said. “Not till some ornery husband stirs things up with a shotgun. You want to be careful now.”

“I am careful,” Arthur said. “I’m a careful man.”

“Yes you are. That’s the truth.” Redmon produced a new package of Luckies from his shirt pocket, zipped it open, and tapped one out. He lit it with a kitchen match from a box on the counter. “I’ve been thinking about you,” he said, “and how careful you are. I don’t know what it was all about with that stout feller, but I thought you handled it okay.”

“I don’t usually drive away the customers.”

“You did fine. You would’ve had your reasons.” He looked into the cloud of smoke he exhaled toward the ceiling. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. You know how it’s been here at the cafe. Business is steady, what with the sawmill and the railroaders, but there ain’t much profit. I’ve been trying to figure out how to do better by you, but I don’t see no way I can come up with much more in terms of wages.”

“That’s all right,” Arthur said. “I know how it is.”

“Yeah. But you’ve been doing a good job. I don’t know when I’ve seen a steadier man. I never could figure why you stuck.”

“The arrangement suits me. I get time to write my stories.”

“Your stories, yeah.” Redmon tapped his ash into a soiled plate and smiled. “You know, I read one of your stories one time. I went down to the news store and bought one of them magazines and read it. Just to see. Beginning to end, I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. It was about some animals on another world— that was all I understood. Do you believe there are other worlds with animals on them?”

“I don’t know.”

“The Bible don’t say nothing about it. So it must be something you just make up in your mind, is that right?”

“The stories I write, I make up.”

“You ever thought about writing a cowboy story, or something that people like more to read?”

“I’m not cut out for it,” Arthur said. “I write the only kind of stories I’m able.” Redmon nodded. “Okay. The reason I ask, I always figured you were staying here till you made some big money with your writing and then you’d move on. If you did, I wouldn’t know what to do. My boy Cletus ain’t interested in this cafe and he ain’t settled enough in mind to run it. I figure Cletus is just about ready to join the armed service, only he don’t know it yet.”

“Cletus is a good boy. He’ll straighten out.”

“I thought maybe if he got married, but then I got to studying on these women he’s been running with. Ain’t none of them would be any help. The trouble was losing his mother when he was little. I didn’t have the furthest notion how to raise a youngun. So I reckon it’s going to have to be Uncle Sam finishes the job.” “You’re probably worrying about it too much.”

“Well, I’ve worried myself gray-headed. Unless it’s just natural age. ” He crushed his butt out in the littered plate. “Which was the other thing I was going to bring up. I don’t want this business to go down the rathole. Someday Cletus might grow into it. Right now he don’t want it, but later on he might. I want you to stay with me and help keep it going. Since I can’t pay you better wage money, I thought I’d offer you an interest in the place. That don’t mean much now, but when times lighten up it will. I can just about guarantee that.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Two percent to start with and then another percent every year till we get to ten. One of these days you’ll find it was a good deal.”

“But in order to get ten percent, I’d have to stay on another eight years.” “Yep.”

“I’ll have to think about it.”

“That’s all I want.” Redmon offered Arthur his hand. “I just want your word you’ll give it fair consideration.”

“Sure I will. The offer means a lot to me.” Arthur took Redmon’s hard, dry hand and shook it twice gently. His own hand was soft and pulpy from washing dishes and he was beginning to grow flabby about the waist.

In fact, his health was none so sound as he had assumed. He learned from his army physical examination in 1942 that his teeth were in need of immediate repair and that one of the doctors thought he detected a heart murmur but wasn’t sure. At any rate, Arthur Strakl was turned down for military service and rode in the bus back to Asheville with a group of other rejects who were rowdy and gloomy by turns. Then he took a westbound milk-stop bus to Cherry Cove, trudged through the lonesome hamlet dark at ten in the evening, went into his little hut, and fell asleep without undressing, only dropping his scuffed brown shoes by the bed.

When he woke next morning, he was still tired and all his skin felt grimy. He took off his shirt and pants and stumbled blindly to the tiny sink and ran water into a porcelain basin and bathed as quickly and thoroughly as he could. Then he placed a blue spatterware pot on his hot plate and set about making coffee.

It was only when he sat at his writing desk sipping at the strong unsugared coffee that he noticed how the big armoire standing against the opposite wall had changed. It was an ancient piece of work, this dim armoire, heavy oak boards stained dark. Inside were Arthur's other three white shirts and two pairs of pants and various socks and handkerchiefs—the respectable wardrobe of a penurious orphan bachelor. He always kept it neat and orderly, the way he kept all his few possessions, the way he kept his life. His life, like his little hut, was always prepared for visitation.

But now the visitation had occurred while he was absent. The doors of the armoire that had been stained almost chocolate were now blue on the right side and violet on the left. His Somewhere Doors had arrived. Arthur was so profoundly gratified that tears trickled down his cheeks and the back of his neck flushed red and warm.

They were not prepossessing. They were the same size and shape as the armoire doors always had been; only the color had changed. The surfaces were matte and cool to the touch when he placed his hand flat against them. But the texture of the surfaces was strange; the material didn't feel like wood or metal or plastic. More like glass with a subtle grain. He placed his ear directly against the blue door and waited a long time but could hear nothing. Still the old chest seemed to breathe silently and steadily, like a great distant creature asleep.

He began to take stock. The room seemed otherwise unchanged, except that his clothing and other belongings had been taken from the armoire and carefully folded and laid out on his one other chair and on his bookcase. But there was a sheet of paper in the typewriter with a sentence cleanly typed in capital letters.

It was unsigned.

“My valuable efforts,'' Arthur said. He rubbed his eyes, brushing away the wetness. “I wish I could see what was so valuable.”

He knew already that the presence of the Somewhere Doors would make an enormous difference, but he could not foresee what different shapes his life might take.

Now, though, he would have to choose. Before the doors arrived he had thought only vaguely about their contrasting possibilities; today the choice had become serious. Would he like to inhabit the golden utopian world that philosophers and visionaries over the centuries had guessed at? To immerse himself in the grandest productions of religious thought, scientific ingenuity, governmental peace, and aesthetic achievement of which human beings were capable? Or would he not rather live on the Garden Planet, the world brimful of pristine creation, the way our own must have been before Adam appeared? There as nowhere else he would be living in the very throb of the heart of existence, in the closest proximity to truth that his organism could endure.

He had been assured that neither world was noxious or dangerous, and he relied upon Francesca’s word.

He knew, though, that the choice would haunt him, sleeping and waking, until it was actually made, and he knew, too, that he would have to watch himself closely so that the balance of his daily existence was not disturbed. He would need to go on about his ordinary business as calmly and orderly as possible; only in this fashion could he make a wisely considered preference.

At this moment it came to him that there was a third choice. A third door, in effect: his own. He could choose to stay on the earth he knew and to go on with his life in Cherry Cove. Where before this obscure cranny of the universe had been a necessity, the haphazard lighting-down place of a kinless and disconnected man, now it assumed the dignity of election. He could choose to live here; he could choose to leave. He turned to look at the flimsy pine door of his little shack, warped and showing morning light at the jamb, and it seemed as strange to him and almost as inviting as the blue door and the violet.

When Cletus died at Anzio, the spirit of his father flickered violently and burned low. He was a man who rarely drank liquor, but during the months of February, March, and April of 1944, he was drunk almost every day. Arthur didn’t mind that; he knew the frenzy would wear off. But he worried about what would happen when Redmon came to himself again. He couldn’t think how the man might change.

After he stopped, it took another three weeks for him to dry out. He was sick the whole time, weak and shaking. Arthur ministered to him and gradually he began to eat normal meals and to drive his old Chevrolet pickup about and to tramp in the woods. One day he came into the cafe with a tinted photograph of Cletus under his arm, the one he’d gotten made with the boy in his uniform and overseas cap. When he climbed on a ladder to drive a nail and hang the picture on the wall behind the counter, Arthur knew that the old man had recovered and was going to make it.

For an old man was what he had become. His gray hair had whitened and his shirt hung loosely over his sunken chest; he had lost weight these last weeks. His eyes were watery behind his wire-rimmed bifocals and now and then Arthur detected a nervous tic new to him: Redmon’s head would jerk suddenly to the left in response to some of the remarks he heard people make. But Arthur was unable to discern what kind of comment caused the reaction.

He took Arthur aside one evening in June when they had finished cleaning up after the supper trade. He spoke as plainly to his friend as he always did, telling him that he regretted his lapse from duty during the last months. “I hated to let go like that,” he said. “But I knew it was either drink or die. And I figured you would either stand by me or you’d haul on down the line. My mind has got better now. It ain’t never going to be well again, but it has got better. I probably wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t’ve helped me out. So I’m having the papers drawn up for you to take possession of one-third of the Red Man Cafe business. We have started to make a little money here now and if we can keep going for a while longer, there will be real money in it. Not millions, you know that. But comfortable— you can live comfortable.”

“You must have known I’d stick with you in the hard time. You knew that, didn’t you?”

Redmon nodded. “I figured you would, but I didn’t know how bad it was going to be. To tell the truth, I still don’t know. I don’t remember it real clear. But I expect I was pretty far-gone.”

“I was worried,” Arthur said. “You came close to hurting yourself a couple of times.”

“So I figured the best way to pay you back was to have these papers drawn up. And there’s something else in the contract, too. It says that when I die, sole ownership of the business will come to you.”

“Wait a minute,” Arthur said. “Don’t you have some relatives somewhere to take exception to that?”

“I got a sister I don’t know where in California. I don’t even know what her last name is these days. She’d have five or six of them by now, I reckon. I got three cousins and an aunt who will do fine on their own. You’re about the closest thing to real family I got left.”

“I’m afraid I make a mighty scrawny family.”

“Times is hard,” Redmon said, and he actually smiled a small sad smile. “What do you say to my offer?”

“It’s just like you for being generous, and a man would be a pure fool not to take you up on it. But this time again I’m going to ask you to let me think about it for a while.”

“Sure. I’d expect you to.”

“I’ll tell you right now that I’ve got an opportunity that few people get. Nobody that I ever heard of, in fact. And it’s more than likely that one of these first days I’ll be gone from here. I don’t know when. It depends on some decisions I need to make.”

“You let me know about any offers you get. I’ll do my best to match them.” “This is the kind of opportunity that can’t be matched. And I won’t be able to let you know beforehand. Once I’m ready to go, I’ll just leave. You won’t know where and you won’t be able to find out. Don’t worry, I’ll be all right. I’ll be exactly where I want to be. But you won’t be able to get in touch.”

Redmon’s face darkened and his shoulders slumped. “Are you going to be leaving real soon? You could tell me that much, at least.”

“I don’t know. I would tell you if I could.”

“Listen,” Redmon said. “Why don’t we dress up that ratty little shack you live in? Or why don’t you just move out of it for good? If you get set up nice and comfortable, you might change your mind about leaving.”

“No.” He spoke as calmly and firmly as he knew how. “I’m doing all right where I am. I’ve got everything fixed just the way I want.”

It had been seven years since he had laid eyes on the man he had named in his mind Ugly Dick, but as soon as he pushed into the empty cafe at three in the afternoon, Arthur recognized him. Time had left the dumpy little man almost untouched. His silver-blond hair had thinned so that his mottled scalp showed through and contempt had made the lines of his lips and eyebrows more deeply crooked. When he spoke, he showed teeth small and brown and yellow.

“Hello, sport,” he said. “You remember me?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, and reached behind him for a soiled rag and wiped the clean counter in front of the man. “Last time you were in here, our coffee didn’t suit you. I don’t know that it’s changed much.”

“I believe I’ll try me a cup anyhow. It couldn’t’ve got no worse.”

“Price went up,” Arthur said. “Prices are up everywhere.”

“Even in Cherry Cola, North Carolina, huh?”

“Even in Cherry Cove.”

He poured in cream and added three precise spoons of sugar and stirred. Then he lifted his head to peer at Arthur and give him that wildly crooked smirk. “I bet you remember our mutual friend, too, don’t you?”

“You say you’ve got a friend?”

“Oh sure, you remember. Sheila Weddell. You wouldn’t be forgetting her.” He gave Arthur a soiled, heavy wink.

“I recall you asking about a woman. But I figured that you must do a lot of that, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Considering what a low-down son of a bitch you are.”

The man’s smile only grew more saturnine. “Still playing Sir Galahad, ain’t you? But I got to tell you, sport, that there ain’t no use in it anymore. You might be interested to see this newspaper story. ” He took a white envelope from his shirt pocket and laid it on the counter. When Arthur stood unmoving, content to give the man a long stare, he tapped it with a pudgy finger. “Go ahead and read it. I guarantee you’ll find it interesting. ”

He picked it up. The headline read: Woman In Spy Scandal Commits Suicide. The story was short and vague. A group of New York people were suspected of gathering information for “a foreign power.” Arthur supposed that the foreign power would be Russia, but the story was hazy in all its details. Sheila Weddell, thirty-four, had been found with her head in the gas oven of her apartment on Amsterdam Avenue. There was no evidence of foul play. The police investigation was continuing.

The clipping did not reveal which newspaper had printed the story. A photograph of the woman was placed above the headline and Arthur studied it intently. It was overexposed and the features were blurred. At first it looked a little like the woman he knew as Francesca and then it didn’t. Then it did again.

“So what do you think of your sweetheart now, huh?”

“I never saw this woman in my life,” Arthur said. He took care in replacing the clipping in the envelope, then laid it on the counter. “I hate to be such a big disappointment to you.”

He produced a toothpick and put it between his front teeth. “We know she passed some information on to you. Something technical. We know you got brains. You don’t fool us, hiding away in this little possum-turd settlement. We read them stories you write and I’ll go ahead and tell you, sport—we’re right on the edge of busting your code. We’ve just about got it figured out.”

“My code?”

“Yeah. The hidden messages in that crazy horseshit you write in them weird magazines. You don’t think your buddies overseas are the only ones that can read, do you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. ”

“Yeah. I was just real positive you wouldn’t know what I was talking about.” “I’m going to ask you again, just like last time, to show me some identification,” Arthur said. “If you’re a government agent, I want to see what kind.”

“What for? I ain’t asking you for nothing. I’m telling you about your girlfriend. That’s all I came in for. I’ll leave this newspaper story with you, to maybe give you something to think about.” He stood up. “And a dime for the coffee, right?” “Keep your damn dime. We don’t want your money.”

“Well now, that’s mighty neighborly of you. So long, sport. Next time we meet it ain’t going to be as pleasant as it has been.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Arthur said. He watched the one enemy he ever knew he possessed waddle toward the door, his toothpick waggling up and down under his nose like a mechanical gadget. When he was gone, Arthur took fifteen cents from his pocket and rang the money into the cash register. He had just remembered that he still owed the cafe a nickel for the coffee Ugly Dick had ordered seven years before.

The next dawn found Arthur before his typewriter, struggling with a tale that was not progressing satisfactorily. He could not say why this particular story about visible creatures who inhabited an invisible planet was so difficult, but he had pottered with it two months now and it still didn’t show signs of life. He sighed and stood up, arched his back and stretched his arms above his head. This mid-September morning, though still only pinkly lit by a pink sun, was full of life, cicadas and crickets sounding away and four roosters near and far voicing their victory over the nighttime.

He took up the envelope again for the dozenth time this morning and opened it and took out the clipping. Peering at it closely under the lamplight, he still couldn’t tell. Was the woman in the photograph his Francesca? He would never be certain about the picture, he knew, and had decided simply to trust his instinct. He felt that the news story was about someone he didn’t know.

The truth was, he didn’t know anything. He didn’t know who Francesca was or Ugly Dick, either. He would never understand what tangle of circumstance had bequeathed him the Somewhere Doors. He looked at them now, their colors still vivid, their surfaces still warmly and lightly pulsing with promise. One thing was certain: Ugly Dick with maybe some ugly help would have gotten into his hut and would have tried to open the doors and they had failed. Neither door would open even for Arthur until he made his fateful decision. Nor could they be damaged in any way.

He was forty-four years old now; he had grown middle-aged in this pleasure of indecision. They had hired a teenager to help wait tables and wash up at the cafe, so his work load had lightened, and his financial situation was secure, compared to the bone-scraping poverty he always had endured. His little hut was still brutally cold in winter and it was still an unhandy and often muddy trek to the outhouse at the edge of the field behind, but the Doors were here and their nearness supported him, comforted him, and never failed to entice with the dilemma they presented.

He slipped the clipping back into the envelope and laid it by his typewriter. Then he tugged on a light denim jacket and went out walking, stalking the dusty gravel road to the bridge and the river. The light was brightening now and a breeze came by as fresh as a cool hand across his forehead.

At the bridge he looked above the twisted waters into the swaying tops of the balsam trees and remembered meeting Francesca here in her white party frock and her white shoes. Maybe one of these days the smooth oxblood car would come darkly humming along again; maybe Francesca would step out. He turned to look, but the road was empty in both directions. Once more he sighed and began to retrace his steps to the hamlet.

On the bank by the bridgehead was a stand of six young silver-birch trees and beneath them a clump of knee-tall bright scarlet bee balm. He stopped for a moment to admire.

And then this scene—the lithe young trees with ragged bark fluttering, the brilliant red flowers nodding as the river purled—overwhelmed him. Almost every day he saw these things and did not see them, walking along absorbed. Anytime he liked he could remember this sight and yet he would always mostly forget. He burst into tears and went down in the road on the gritty gravel on his hands and knees, realizing that he had made his decision.

The sadness of utopia was the same sadness as that of paradise. Utopia and paradise could not remember. They were eternal and unaging and had no history to come to nor any to leave behind. They were dreams that Arthur for a long time had been experiencing with all his senses except those of his body. He had already opened both Doors and visited both Somewheres. He was ready to fling open wide the third door, the entrance to the world in which he already lived. Much had passed him by. Oh yes. Yet much awaited him still.

But right now and for five minutes longer he had no strength to rise. He remained on his hands and knees in the hard gray dirt of the road, weeping aloud like a child deceived or undeceived.