The Ugly Little Boy

Miss Fellowes hugged him and rocked him lightly from side to side, murmuring his name, crooning to him. His small body was rigid. He might almost have been under some kind of a spell. The clicking went on and on, interspersed with the sort of feral growls he had uttered in the early weeks of his stay. It was frightening to hear him revert like that to his prehistoric self.

"There, there, Timmie-little boy-Miss Fellowes' little boy-it's all right, everything's all right, there's nothing to worry about. -Would you like some milk, Timmie?"

She felt him grow less stiff. He was waking up now.

"Miss-Fellowes," he said haltingly.

"Milk? A little warm milk, Timmie?"

"Milk. Yes. Want milk."

"Come," she said, and swooped him up out of the bed, carrying him into the kitchen. It didn't strike her as a good idea to leave him alone just now. She perched him on the stool next to the refrigeration unit, got out a flask of milk, popped it in the heater for a moment.*.

"What was it?" she asked him, as he drank. "A dream? A bad dream, Timmie?"

He nodded, busy with the milk. Miss Fellowes waited for him to finish.

"Dream," he said. It was one of his newest words. "Bad. Bad dream."

"Dreams aren't real." Did he understand that? "You don't have to be afraid of dreams, Timmie."

"Bad-dream-''

His face was solemn. He seemed to be shivering, though the dollhouse was as warm as ever.

"Come back to bed now," she told him, scooping him up again. She tucked him in. -"What did you dream, Timmie? Can you tell me what it was?"

He made clicks again, a long series of them, interrupted by two short, soft growls.

Reverting to the old ways in the stress of the night? Or was it simply that he lacked the vocabulary to describe the dream in English?

Then he said, "Out-side."

His enunciation was so poor she wasn't certain that she heard him right.

"Outside? Is that what you said?"

"Out-side," he said again.

Yes, she was fairly sure of it. "Outside the bubble?" Miss Fellowes pointed toward the wall. "Out there?"

He nodded. "Out-side."

"You dreamed that you were outside there?"

Vigorous nodding. "Yes."

"And what did you see out there?"

He made clicks.

"I can't understand you."

The clicks became more insistent.

"No, Timmie. It's no good. You have to speak my kind of words. I don't understand yours. When you dreamed you were outside-what did you see?"

"Nothing," he said. "Empty."

Empty, yes. No wonder. He had no idea what was out there. The dollhouse's single window showed him only a little grassy patch, a fence, a meaningless sign.

"Big-empty," he said.

"You didn't see anything at all out there?"

Clicks.

Perhaps in his sleep he had been back in his Neanderthal world, and he had seen Ice Age scenes, drifts of snow, great shambling hairy animals wandering across the land, people clad in robes made of fur. But he had no words in English to describe any of that to her; and so he used the only sounds he did know.

"Outside," he said again. "Big-empty-"

"Scary?" Miss Fellowes prompted.

"Empty," he said. "Timmie alone."

Yes, she thought. Timmie alone. You poor, poor child.

She hugged him and tucked him in a second time, for he had pulled the coverlet free, and she gave him one of his favorite toys, a shapeless green floppy-limbed animal that was supposed to be a dinosaur. Dr. Mclntyre had scowled when he saw it, and had given her one of his little paleoanthropological lectures about how it was a mistake to think that prehistoric man had been in any way a contemporary of the dinosaurs-a common popular error, he said, but in fact the Mesozoic Era had ended many millions of years before the appearance on the evolutionary scene of the first manlike primates. Yes, Miss Fellowes said, I know all that. But Timmie doesn't, and he loves his dinosaur very much. The boy hugged it now; and Miss Fellowes stood beside his bed until he had fallen asleep again.

No more bad dreams, she told him silently. ЈJo dreams of the great empty place outside where Timmie is all alone.

She went back to her own bed. A glance at the clock on the dresser told her that the rime was a quarter to five. Too close to morning; she doubted that she would get back to sleep. More likely she'd simply lie awake, vigilantly listening for sounds from Timmie's room, and before long it would be dawn.

But she was wrong. Sleep took her quickly; and this time she was the one who dreamed.

She was in her bed, not here in the dollhouse but in her little apartment on the other side of town, which she hadn't seen in so many months. Someone was knocking on her door: eagerly, urgently, impatiently. She rose, slipping on a bathrobe, and activated the security screen. A man stood in the hall: a youngish man with close-clinging red hair, and a reddish beard, too.

Bruce Ma

"Edith?" he said. "Edith, I have to see you."

He was smiling. Her hands shook a little as she undid the safeties on the door. He loomed before her in the dark, shadowy hallway, taller than she remembered, broad-shouldered, a sturdy virile figure. "Edith," he said. "Oh, Edith, it's been such a long time-"

And then she was in his arms. Right there in the hall, heedless of the staring neighbors, who stood in their doorways, pointing and murmuring. He swept her up as she had swept Timmie up not long before-carried her into her own apartment-whispering her name all the while"Bruce," she said. And realized that she had spoken the name aloud. She was awake. She sat up quickly and pressed both her hands over her mouth. Her cheeks were hot and stinging with embarrassment. Fragments of the dream whirled in her astounded mind. The absurdity of it -and its blatant schoolgirlish eroticism-stu

And to pick Bruce Ma

She began to laugh.

Dr. Hoskins would be appalled, if he knew! His reliable, dependable Miss Fellowes-consorting intimately with the enemy, even if only in her dreams!

How ridiculous-how preposterousHow pathetic, she told herself abruptly.

The aura of the dream still hovered about her. Some of the details were already gone from her mind. Others burned as vividly as though she were still asleep. His ardent embrace, his steamy passionate whispering. Edith- Edith-it's been such a long time, EdithA spinster's pitiful little fantasy. Sick. Sick. Miss Fellowes began to tremble, and had to struggle to fight off tears. The dream no longer seemed in any way fu

Only a dream. Only. The sleeping mind is capable of liberating any kind of thought at all. Strange things drift around randomly in there, floating on the tides of the unconscious. It meant nothing, nothing at all, other than that Bruce Ma

The thing to do now was to go back to sleep, she decided. By the time morning came she would probably have forgotten the whole thing.

Miss Fellowes closed her eyes again. After a while, she slept. The shadow of the dream was still with her, though, the vague outline and humiliating essence of it, when she woke once again a little past six as Timmie began to move about in his room: the urgent knocking at her door, the breathless greeting, the passionate embrace. But the whole thing simply seemed absurd to her now.

After all the talk of the need to get a playmate for Timmie, Miss Fellowes expected that Hoskins would produce one almost immediately, if only to pacify the powerful political forces that Ma

Indeed she saw almost nothing of Hoskins in this period. Evidently he was preoccupied with other activities of Stasis Technologies, Ltd., and she caught no more than an occasional glimpse of him in passing. Ru

Be that as it may. He had his problems; she had hers.

Timmie's increasing loneliness was one of the worst of them. She tried to be everything the boy needed, nurse and teacher and surrogate mother; but she couldn't be enough. He dreamed again and again, always the same dream-not every night but often enough so that Miss Fellowes began keeping a record of the frequency of the dream-of that big, empty place outside the dollhouse where he could never be allowed to go. Sometimes he was alone out there; sometimes there were shadowy, mysterious figures with him. Because his English was still so rudimentary, she still wasn't able to tell whether the big empty place represented the lost Ice Age world to him or his imagined fantasy of the strange new era into which he had been brought. Either way, it was a frightening place to him, and he often awoke in tears. It wasn't necessary to have a degree in psychiatry to know that the dream was a powerful symptom of Timmie's isolation, his deepening sadness.