Time is the Simplest Thing

SEVENTEEN

Blaine lay for a long time, soaking in the feel of body, for now he had a body. He could feel the pressure on it, he could sense the movement of the air as it touched the skin, knew the hot damp of perspiration prickle along his arms and face and chest.

He was no longer in the blue room, for there he had no body and there was no longer the far-off sound of the desert wind. There was, instead, a regular rasping sound that had a slobber in it. And there was a smell, an astringent smell, an aggressively antiseptic odor that filled not only the nostrils, but the entire body.

He let his eyelids come up slowly against possible surprise, set to snap them shut again if there should be a need. But there was only whiteness, plain and unrelieved. There was no more than the whiteness of a ceiling.

His head was on a pillow and there was a sheet beneath him and he was dressed in some sort of garment that had a scratchiness.

He moved his head and he saw the other bed and upon it lay a mummy.

Time, the creature on that other world had said, time is the simplest thing there is. And it had said that it would tell him, but it hadn’t told him, for he hadn’t stayed to hear.

It was like a dream, he thought — thinking back on it, it had the unreal, flat-planed quality of a dream, but it had not been any dream. He had been in the blue room once again and he’d talked with the creature that was its habitant. He had heard it spin its yarns and he still retained within his mind the details of those yarns. There was no fading of the detail as there would have been if it had been a dream.

The mummy lay upon the bed swathed in bandages. There were holes in the bandages for the nostrils and the mouth but no holes for the eyes. And as it breathed it slobbered.

The walls were of the same whiteness as the ceiling, and the floors were covered with ceramic tile and there was a sterility about the place that shrieked its identity.

He was in a hospital room with a slobbering mummy.

Fear moved in on him, a sudden wash of fear, but he lay there quietly while it washed over him. For even in the fear, he knew that he was safe. There was some reason he was safe. There was some reason if he could think of it.

Where had he been? he wondered; where had he been other than the blue room? His mind went tracking back and he remembered where he’d been — in the willow thicket in the gully beyond the edge of town.

There were footsteps in the hall outside, and a man with a white jacket came into the room.

The man stopped inside the door and stood there looking at him.

“So you’ve come around at last,” the doctor said. “Just how do you feel?”

“Not too bad,” said Blaine, and actually he felt fine. There didn’t seem to be a thing the matter. “Where did you pick me up?”

The doctor did not answer. He asked another question. “Did anything like this ever happen to you before?”

“Like what?”

“Blacking out,” the doctor. “Falling into coma.”

Blaine rocked his head from side to side upon the pillow. “Not that I recall.”

“Almost,” the doctor said, “as if you were the victim of a spell.”

Blaine laughed. “Witchcraft, doctor?”

The doctor grimaced. “No, I don’t imagine so. But one never knows. The patient sometimes thinks so.”

He crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“I’m Dr. Wetmore,” he told Blaine. “You’ve been here two days. Some boys were hunting rabbits east of town. They found you. You had crawled underneath some willows. They thought that you were dead.”

“And so you hauled me in.”

“The police did. They went out and got you.”

“And what is wrong with me?”

Wetmore shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“I haven’t any money. I can’t pay you, Doctor.”

“That,” the doctor told him, “is not of any moment.”

He sat there, looking at him. “There is one thing, however. There were no papers on you. Do you remember who you are?”

“Sure. I’m Shepherd Blaine.”

“And you live where?”

“Nowhere,” said Blaine. “I just wander around.”

“How did you get to this town?”

“I don’t somehow recall.”

He sat up in bed. “Look, Doctor, how about getting out of here? I’m taking up a bed.”

The doctor shook his head. “I’d like you to stick around. There are several tests—”

“It’ll be a lot of trouble.”

“I’ve never run across a case like yours,” the doctor said. “You’d be doing me a favor. There was nothing wrong with you. Nothing organically, that is. Your heartbeat was retarded. Your breathing a little shallow. Your temperature off a point or two. But otherwise all right, except that you were out. No way of waking you.”

Blaine jerked his head toward the mummy. “He’s in bad shape, isn’t he?”

“Highway accident,” the doctor said.

“That’s a bit unusual. Not many any more.”

“Unusual circumstance,” the doctor explained. “Driving an old truck. Tire blew when he was going fast. One of the curves above the river.”

Blaine looked sharply at the man on the other bed, but there was no way to tell. None of him was showing. His breath went slobbering in and out and there was a rasping to it, but there was no way to tell who he might be.

“I could arrange another room,” the doctor offered.

“No need. I won’t be around too long.”

“I wish you’d stay awhile. You might flop over once again. And not be found this time.”

“I’ll think on it,” Blaine promised.

He lay back on the bed.

The doctor rose and went to the other bed. He bent over it and listened to the breathing. He found a wad of cotton and dabbed it at the lips. He murmured at the man who lay there, then he straightened up.

“Anything you need?” he inquired of Blaine. “You must be getting hungry.”

Blaine nodded. Now that he thought of it, he was.

“No hurry, though,” he said.

“I’ll speak to the kitchen,” said the doctor. “They’ll find something for you.”

He turned about and walked briskly from the room, and Blaine lay listening to his crisp, quick footsteps going down the hall.

And suddenly he knew — or remembered — why he now was safe. The flashing signal light was gone, for the creature of the far star had taken it from him. Now there was no longer need to skulk, no need of hiding out.

He lay there and thought about it and felt a bit more human — although, to tell the truth, he had never felt anything but human. Although now, for the first time, beneath the humanness, he felt the quick, tense straining of new knowledge, of a deep strata of new knowledge that was his to tap.

Across, in the other bed, the mummy wheezed and rasped and slobbered.

“Riley!” whispered Blaine.

There was no break in the breathing, no sign of recognition.

Blaine swung on the bed and thrust out his feet. He sat on the edge of the bed and let his feet down to the floor, and the patterned tile was chill. He stood up, and the scratchy hospital gown hung obscenely around his shanks.

At the other bed, he bent close above the white-swathed thing that lay there.

“Riley! Is it you? Riley, do you hear me?”

The mummy stirred.

The head tried to turn toward him but it couldn’t. The lips moved with an effort. The tongue fought to frame a sound.

“Tell . . .” it said, dragging out the word with the effort of its saying.

It tried again. “Tell Finn,” it said.

There was more to say. Blaine could sense that there was more to say. He waited. The lips moved again, laboriously, and yet again. The tongue writhed heavily inside the slobbering cavern. But there was nothing more.

“Riley!” But there was no answer.

Blaine backed away until the edge of his bed caught him back of the knees and he sat down upon it.

He stayed there, staring at the swathed figure motionless on the bed.

And the fear, he thought, had caught up with the man at last, the fear that he had raced across half a continent. Although, perhaps, not the fear he ran from, but another fear and another danger.

Riley gasped and panted.

And there he lay, thought Blaine, a man who had some piece of information to pass on to a man named Finn. Who was Finn and where? What had he to do with Riley?

Finn?

There had been a Finn.

Once, long ago, he’d known the name of Finn.

Blaine sat stiff and straight upon the bed, remembering what he knew of Finn.

Although it might be a different Finn.

For Lambert Finn had been a Fishhook traveler, too, although he’d disappeared, even as Godfrey Stone had disappeared, but many years before Stone had disappeared, long before Blaine himself had ever come to Fishhook.

And now he was a whispered name, a legend, a chilling character in a chilling story, one of the few Fishhook horror tales.

For, so the story ran, Lambert Finn had come back from the stars one day a screaming maniac!