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  The car would not start. She sat behind the wheel and cursed, a stringy woman with bad teeth and lank hair, musty and disheveled and becoming frantic. Without pause in her swearing she left the car and, sweating, returned to the house to use the telephone. The taxicab company told her the town’s only taxi would not be available until the afternoon.

  She stood clutching the telephone, frozen by panic. She did not see how she could walk the mile to the liquor store, but no matter how desperately she tried, she could think of no alternative. She was quite unable to cope with the problem. Until her brain had received its wonted portion of alcohol, it scarcely functioned at all, and getting the alcohol to make thinking possible was itself her problem. Frustration squeezed her in a clawed vice and became anger, a red extremity of rage that she thought might burst her head with its intensity.

  Through the door to the kitchen she caught sight of Loob, sitting dumbly in his corner staring at nothing. “You bastard!” she shouted. “You goddam crazy dummy, you old goddam crazy dummy! Sit and hold your goddam crazy rag all day, you goddam crazy dummy! Why can’t you do something?”

  Loob did not move, did not blink. She rushed into the kitchen and struck him on the cheek with her fist. He gave no sign of feeling it. “Goddam you!” she shouted. “Goddam, oh, goddam!” Loob sat and stared emptily. “You bastard,” she said, panting now. “Oh, you big dummy bastard.” Her eye fell upon the rag. “Oh, you big dummy bastard with your rag.”

  She snatched suddenly, and the rag was in her hand. Without hesitation she pulled a lid off the stove and dropped the rag inside, where coals still glowed. “There, you crazy dummy!” she said. “There’s your crazy rag.” There was a crackle of flame inside the stove.

  Still Loob made no sign. She gave a wordless shriek, a yelp of pure, helpless rage, and struck him again, to no effect whatever. She stood trembling for a moment and then ran from the room and from the house and stood sobbing beside the road. A car came, and she held up her hand. The car stopped and picked her up.

  In the kitchen Loob sat without movement for some time. Then his hand opened, lay so for a moment, and clenched again. He repeated the movement two or three times. He rose ponderously, lurched out through the kitchen door, and made his way through the litter of the back yard to a gap in the fence, and thence through a vacant lot to Dappling Road. He proceeded erratically down the road, as he had a thousand times before, and turned in at the derelict slag lane that led down to the old house. When he reached the house he climbed the discolored stone steps, entered, and took his seat in the window. His hand was slowly clenching and unclenching.

  Something new had happened — was happening — to him: he was, improbably, in the grip of an emotion. Somewhere in the ruinous labyrinth of his mind there was adumbrated a feeling of loss, something nameless that was forever gone. There was no way for him to weigh the matter, to reflect upon the strangeness of this phenomenon; he could only react instinctively: Danger: Strike. He struck.

  It was toward the end of a long August afternoon in 1905, and Sam Dappling was opening a door, entering the room where Olivia was playing Chopin. A houseguest, a cousin from Philadelphia, stood beside the piano and turned the pages of the music, and two other visitors, another cousin and his wife, listened from seats on a divan. As he crossed the threshold, placid, genial Sam Dappling went mad; the black discharge of Loob’s strange ordnance smashed into his brain, instantly exploding a million subtle connections, and in the moment of passing through the doorway Sam Dappling ceased to exist. In his stead was something monstrous, a thing bulging with insensate ferocity, that ran suddenly into the room and tore from the wall the Civil War saber that hung under a portrait of old General Dappling. It whirled with the saber in its hand and without the slightest pause accelerated into frenzied motion, filling the room with a demented fury of destruction and dismemberment; and when the butchery at last was done, it again did not pause, but rushed dripping out of that place of blood and stink and twitching scraps into the outdoors, onto the lawn where a child and a dog played in the sunshine.

  It left unspeakable things scattered there on the grass and plunged, howling, into the barn, where it found only a mare and her foal, upon whom it fell in undiminished frenzy. When there was no more movement in the stall, it paused for a fraction of a moment. In the loft pigeons were fluttering; it heard the sound and went swarming up the ladder, in no way slowed by the saber. The pigeons were out of reach, swooping just under the roof, far above. At the end of the loft was another ladder, leading up to the great opening under the ridge pole through which the hay was hauled into the mow. It scuttled up with the agility of a great feral monkey. A startled pigeon flapped in confusion and then flew hastily through the opening, and the thing that had been Sam Dappling leaped for it, wildly cutting with its sword. The pigeon rose gracefully and curved back to alight on the roof. The thing sailed outward and dropped, still slicing and hacking at the air through which it fell. It struck the hard-packed earth and bounced slightly and was still. In the house the screaming had just begun.

  For Henry Dappling it never stopped. He lived for the seven years that remained of his life with a never-ending scream in his ears. It was not the screaming from the house that he heard; it was the demented noise that came from Mrs. McVay, who was standing on the lawn with her face to the sky as he rode the gray out of the woods that evening. He had emerged from the sun-shot cool gloom and silence of the forest into the full evening sunlight and pulled up as usual. He heard it then, a mindless howl of terror and loss and unutterable grief, ripping through the bright clear air with ugly insistence, smirching the evening. He put the gray into a dead run, down the meadow and the drive and over the lawn to where she stood screaming and screaming. He saw what she held in her hands.

  That was the real end of Henry Dappling’s life. His remaining seven years were something worse than death. He would have made a quick end of it almost immediately, except that he did not see how he could die without knowing why. Even a vindictive maniac God must have had a reason for so gross an affront to decency, so loathsome and abominable a cruelty as permitting him to see the bulging small blue eyes and yellow curls of what was frozen in Mrs. McVay’s clawed hands. The question became almost the sole tenant of his mind, a consuming obsession that was never absent for a second of his years as a mad hermit in his mansion. He did not find his answer, of course, and he died at last with the screaming still in his ears, alone in the great house where mildew and dry rot were crumbling the interior and weeds and branches besieged the walls. Long before his death the house had come to look desolate and abandoned, and it was known as a haunted house while its master still lived within its walls.

  He had attended the funeral; indeed, he had taken charge from the very first, from the moment he had pried Mrs. McVay’s hands away from their awful burden. He had shouted at her in so loud and peremptory a voice that her hysteria was punctured, and she took hold of herself and obeyed his instructions to gather together the men whom he named and to have the sheriff sent for. He himself told the men what to do, evincing no emotion at the sight of the shambles in the house or the pitiful thing that had been his son lying broken on the ramp of the barn. He went about for the three days, with an expressionless face, speaking, when speech was needful, in a precise cold voice, glassy-hard and without apparent grief or rage. He was watched warily: at any moment full realization might strike him, and he could be expected to do something strange — to become violent and murderous or perhaps lose his mind entirely and gibber and drool.

  In fact he did none of those things. After the funeral he took the superintendent of the mill aside. “Pay off everybody,” he said. “Yourself, too. Lock it up.”

  “What?” said the superintendent. “Pay — ? Lock — ? What?”

  “Do it,” Dappling said. The superintendent did. The town stopped. The big houses lost their people first, as the men who had run the mill betook themselves to Pittsburgh and Gary. Then some of the row houses empt
ied; venturesome or ambitious men severed their roots and went to Wheeling or Youngstown, while others, in whom the old highland blood ran strong, satisfied a perennial urge and returned to the cabins. A majority stayed. They stayed and watched the town decay around them, a passive indolent community bereft of leadership and energy, doomed now to a long sleep and then extinction.

  It stirred to life, briefly, during the First World War; money and importunities from Washington effected a partial resolution of the chaos into which Dappling’s estate had fallen and the mill was put into operation for a year, although the already archaic equipment was hopelessly inefficient. After the Armistice the ponderous machinery of the law again clanked into operation; the gates were relocked, the new railroad sidings left to rust. The tedious succession of suit and countersuit, stay and deferral, lien and attachment and injunction was resumed and dragged its dusty way through courtrooms and sheriff’s offices and lawyers’ chambers. If Dappling had died with his family, there would have been no problem; his affairs would have been carried on without even a pause by an existing establishment. But he lived on for seven years, and there was no way to appoint an executor or administrator for a living man. They might have had him certified incompetent, but no one dared. And so no taxes were paid or rents collected; no one voted shares of stock or gave proxies for them; no one guarded or was responsible for property and accounts. Sheriff’s deputies nailed notices to doors; servers of process came and went; various bank accounts stagnated or were looted. Numbers of small suppliers went bankrupt; certain bankers and lawyers prospered greatly.

  And all the while the town shrank and rotted and waited for the better times that had to come, and Henry Dappling, grown hairy and filthy and emaciated, crept through the dark haunted rooms of his mansion and endlessly asked his unanswerable question. One day in the seventh summer, McVay, who each week left a supply of food for the hermit at the kitchen door, found the previous week’s provisions still on the step. He called the sheriff, who came with a fat deputy, broke into the shuttered house, and found Dappling’s body. The screaming had stopped at last.

  Lawful administration of the estate began at once, but it was too late. Except for the federal cutting of the Gordian Knot for wartime purposes, there had never been a hope of bringing enough order out of the chaos to make the mill a going enterprise again. Vultures and then beetles picked the carcass clean and left the town to its own devices.

  It could devise nothing but stagnation. When the Great Depression came, the event would have passed unnoticed by the people had it not been for the fact that money began to arrive from the government. They were at first too proud to accept it, and then they accepted it and were ashamed, and in due course they were not ashamed but came to think of it as rightfully theirs. The relief checks became the way of life of the town, an assurance of a livelihood for even the most indolent and feckless. When times at last improved, there was a leaching away of the brighter and abler young, who went to seek a future elsewhere; and by the time “relief” became “welfare,” no one there worked at all except for a few torpid merchants, whose customers paid with government checks. The town would not die, but it lived — or half-lived — as a parasite.

  The citizens know no other life. Loob was born to it, and so was his mother, and his grandmother came to it before her adolescence. These are people who do not know want, but have never known prosperity. They do not know ambition or thrift; neither do they know toil or hunger. Their possessions are cheap and gaudy and soiled, their diet deficient in nourishment and abundant in sugar, their music a commercial debasement of the folk music of their fathers. They drink fiercely and are given to casual incest and sometimes slice each other with knives. Their only dreams are of winning prizes on television giveaway shows. These are the descendants of the stern mountaineers who were Henry Dappling’s people. Down the years each generation has been more misshapen than its predecessor. Loob is their ultimate fruit.

  And so a circle is completed. Because Loob is what he is, he shattered the mind of Sam Dappling and so damned the town. Because the town was damned, Loob is what he is.

  There is no point of entry into this circle: Loob created the events that created Loob. And since that cannot be, it is necessary to consider the possibility that these things did not happen at all. It may be that someday, as Loob sits in the window, his censor may not operate, he may see the scene through to its end; and now, with the loss of his toy no longer a fresh wound, and indeed probably no longer even a scar, he may let Sam come through the door and enter the room unchanged. If that should come about, then none of this happened; if Sam comes unscathed across the threshold, the past has once more been changed. Or left unchanged. The entry into the room of a sane Sam Dappling will mean that the horrors of that evening never occurred, that through the years ahead events will take place with Sam and Emily and Olivia alive, with Henry Dappling a fulfilled and happy man. It will mean that at the moment Loob fails to loose his bolt, he will never have existed.

  One would perhaps then find in the bay of the window not a pale gross cretin crouched on a box, but an old lady in a Sheraton chair, who contemplates with eyes that are still merry and blue the long slope of lawn outside the window. The old piano is still in the room, its top covered with photographs, among them those of her great-grandchildren. Her great-grandfather’s portrait as a general hangs on the wall and under it his saber, unblooded since Bull Run. The woodwork of the room glows with the deep luster of fervent polishings, the metal is bright, the glass sparkles. It is an old room and a happy one, sunny and filled with good things well cared for, an appropriate setting for this patrician lady.

  She is waiting for someone, perhaps her grandson, almost certainly her grandson. He will no doubt arrive in the Ferrari, sending up a spray of white gravel when he brakes in front of the house. A manservant will hurry down to get his luggage, but he is already halfway up the steps, a trim athletic young man in flannels and tweed jacket. He has been in the East for a month of polo, but now he is home again, home where he is heir to the town and the big house. The townspeople had smiled and waved as the Ferrari growled up steep Main Street past the busy mill and the gleaming row houses, around the square with its sleek shops and smug shopkeepers, and up to where Dappling Road curled around the hill to the monumental gates of the estate.

  Grandmother has laid on champagne for the occasion, chilled in a monogrammed silver bucket. She raises her glass in a toast to the happy homecoming, and the happy homecomer responds. We make a pretty picture there in that elegant room, beaming at each other: she slim, erect, and proud, wearing her years with grace; I the golden youth, handsome, cultured, immensely rich, at play for a while before settling down to my responsibilities. This is who I am. I am not the man they call Tom Perkins, the crazy sweeper of a sleazy bar in a decayed simulacrum of my town. This—this is the real world, this world with the champagne and the Ferrari, not the shoddy horror where the Perkins creature lives, where I am standing now.

  And the real world is so very close. If once, only once, Loob permits Sam to enter the room, Loob never existed, and the town’s history followed the main, the real thoroughfare, and I am safely where I belong, and none of this vile scenario ever took place. I think I will not be aware of the transition — indeed, there will not be a transition: all this simply will not have been, and there will nowhere be the faintest memory or even dream of this grim place. I will be sipping my champagne in my grandmother’s drawing room, and all will be as it always was.

  That is what I believe as I stand here among the cold weeds watching Loob in the window, as I wait for the instant that I am real again. And that is going to happen. I have no doubt that it will happen, none at all. None at all. Because I have positive proof that Loob can undo his interference with the past.

  The proof is this: they are here, the Goster County dogs. They are here, gravely patrolling the streets of the town and the country round about, alert, watchful, and intimidating, as much a part of the la
ndscape as the ridge above the town. And they have always been here. That is the point, that is the proof. Never since about the time of the Mexican War has the town been without these dogs. Think about that. It is quite obvious that a day came when there was a repetition of the circumstances surrounding the destruction of the old ancestor dog, with Loob in the same location when that same segment of the past unreeled itself. This time, though, Loob’s vacant stare was directed elsewhere when the dog attacked. There was thus no instinctive reaction to the attacks; the dog lived on to beget his progeny. There is no fact in the universe more certain than the existence of these dogs. One of them is watching me now.

  If Loob can do that, he can put right his other, greater, his infinitely tragic interference. And when he does, he and the wretched Tom Perkins will never have been. The world will be back on its true path, the path where there is love and comfort and safety.

  It will.

  Change of Address

  (The Magazine of Fantasy & S.F., September 1979)

  Willis Barley, a bookkeeper, had a beautiful daughter who was the apple of his eye, and she ran away to live in the slums with a guitar player. At about the same time, his son announced that he was homosexual, and his wife, caught up in some menopausal flight from reality, began an affair with a wholesale furniture salesman who wore trendy clothes and a hairpiece. Then the owner of the construction company where he worked sold the firm to a competitor, who sent word that he would not require the services of the office staff.

  All of this happened within the space of a few months, and Barley underwent an extreme depression of spirit, becoming at last so melancholy that he gave serious thought to taking poison or leaping off a high structure. Very often, as he sat alone in the dingy apartment where he now lived, he found himself wanting very much to cry, but unable to do so; this added a glum frustration to his other woes.