Haggopian and Other Stories

The shadow thickened darkly, growing in me, spreading from hidden to more truly conscious regions of my mind. “Help you? You mean you intend to—” I paused, then started to speak again as I saw for sure what she was getting at and realised that she meant it: “But haven’t you said that this stuff was too dangerous? The last time you—”

“Oh, yes, I know,” she impatiently argued, cutting me off. “But now, well, it’s different. I won’t stay more than a moment or two—just long enough to see the children—and then I’ll get straight back…here. And there’ll be precautions. It can’t fail, you’ll see.”

“Precautions?” Despite myself I was interested.

“Yes,” she began to talk faster, growing more excited with each passing moment. “The way I’ve worked it out, it’s perfectly safe. To start with, George will be asleep—he won’t know anything about it. When his sleeping mind moves into my body, why, it will simply stay asleep! On the other hand, when my mind moves into his body, then I’ll be able to move about and—”

“And use your brother as a keyhole!” I blurted, surprising even myself. She frowned, then turned her face away. What she planned was wrong. I knew it and so did she, but if my outburst had shamed her it certainly had not deterred her—not for long.

When she looked at me again her eyes were almost pleading. “I know how it must look to you, Love, but it’s not so. And I know that I must seem to be a selfish woman, but that’s not quite true either. Isn’t it natural that I should want to see my family? They are mine, you know. George, my brother; his wife, my sister-in-law; their children, my nephew and niece. Just a—yes—a ‘peep’, if that’s the way you see it. But, Love, I need that peep. I’ll only have a few moments, and I’ll have to make them last me for the rest of my life.”

I began to weaken. “How will you go about it?”

“First, a glance,” she eagerly answered, again reminding me of a young girl. “Nothing more, a mere glance. Even if he’s awake he won’t ever know I was there; he’ll think his mind wandered for the merest second. If he is asleep, though, then I’ll be able to, well, ‘wake him up’, see his wife—and, if the children are still at home, why, I’ll be able to see them too. Just a glance.”

“But suppose something does go wrong?” I asked bluntly, coming back to earth. “Why, you might come back and find your head in the gas oven! What’s to stop him from slashing your wrists? That only takes a second, you know.”

“That’s where you come in, Love.” She stood up and patted me on the cheek, smiling cleverly. “You’ll be right here to see that nothing goes wrong.”

“But—”

“And to be doubly sure,” she cut me off, “why, I’ll be tied in my chair! You can’t walk through windows when you’re tied down, now can you?”

• • •

Half an hour later, still suffering inwardly from that as yet unspecified foreboding, I had done as Aunt Hester directed me to do, tying her wrists to the arms of her cane chair with soft but fairly strong bandages from her medicine cabinet in the bathroom.

She had it all worked out, reasoning that it would be very early morning in Australia and that her brother would still be sleeping. As soon as she was comfortable, without another word, she closed her eyes and let her head fall slowly forward onto her chest. Outside, the sun still had some way to go to setting; inside, the room was still warm—yet I shuddered oddly with a deep, nervous chilling of my blood.

It was then that I tried to bring the thing to a halt, calling her name and shaking her shoulder, but she only brushed my hand away and hushed me. I went back to my chair and watched her anxiously.

As the shadows seemed visibly to lengthen in the room and my skin cooled, her head sank even deeper onto her chest, so that I began to think she had fallen asleep. Then she settled herself more comfortably yet and I saw that she was still awake, merely preparing her body for her brother’s slumbering mind.

In another moment I knew that something had changed. Her position was as it had been; the shadows crept slowly still; the ancient clock on the wall ticked its regular chronological message; but I had grown inexplicably colder, and there was this feeling that something had changed…

Suddenly there flashed before my mind’s eye certain of those warning jottings I had read only a few nights earlier, and there and then I was determined that this thing should go no further. Oh, she had warned me not to do anything to frighten or disturb her, but this was different. Somehow I knew that if I didn’t act now—

“Hester! Aunt Hester!” I jumped up and moved toward her, my throat dry and my words cracked and unnatural-sounding. And she lifted her head and opened her eyes.

For a moment I thought that everything was all right—then…