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Chapter seven
At the edge of the road in front of Jack's house, we sat down in the grass beside my car, our feet over the embankment, each with a cigarette in hand, staring down at the town in the valley. I'd seen it like this more than once, coming through the hills from night-time calls. The roof tops were still grey and colourless, but all over the town now, windows flashed a dull blind orange in the almost level rays of the rising sun. Even as we watched, the orange-coloured windows were brightening, lightening in tone, as the sun's rim moved, inching up over the eastern horizon. Here and there, from an occasional chimney, we could see a begi
Jack murmured, speaking to himself actually, shaking his head, as he stared down at the toy houses below. "It just won't bear thinking about," he said. "How many of those things are down there in town right now? Hidden away in secret places."
Ma
My mouth opened to protest, but Ma
His arm swung outward, gesturing at the miniature town below us, brightening in the first morning sun. "Down there in Santa Mira a week or ten days ago, someone formed a delusion; a member of his family was not what he seemed, but an impostor. It's not a common delusion precisely, but it happens occasionally, and every psychiatrist encounters it sooner or later. Usually he has some idea of how to treat it."
Ma
We just shook our heads and waited.
"Well" – Ma
"On September 2, 1944, in the middle of the night, a woman phoned the police; someone had tried to kill her neighbour with poison gas. This neighbour, a woman, had awakened around midnight; her husband was at work on the night shift of a factory. The woman's room was filled with a peculiar, sweet-smelling, sickening odour. She tried to get up, but her legs were paralyzed. She managed to crawl to the phone and call her neighbour, who notified the police.
"The police arrived, and did what they could; they found a door unlocked, by which someone could have entered, but of course there was no one else around the house any more. A night or so later, the police got another call, and again found a partly paralyzed, very sick woman; someone had tried to kill her with poison gas. That same night, the same thing happened again, in another part of town. And when a dozen or more women were attacked in the same way on following nights, each sick and partly paralyzed from a sicklysmelling gas pumped into their rooms while they slept, the police knew they had a psychopath to find; a maniac, as the newspapers were calling him."
Ma
"Now the State Police were called in, because in only a single night, seven more women were gassed and partly paralyzed. Reporters were in town too, from the press services, and most of the Chicago newspapers; you can find accounts of all this in their files. At night now, in Mattoon, Illinois, in 1944, cars patrolled the streets filled with men carrying shotguns; neighbours organized into squads, patrolling their own blocks in shifts; and the attacks continued, and the maniac wasn't found.
"Finally, one night, there were eight state squad cars in town, and a mobile radio unit. A doctor, prepared and waiting, was at the local Methodist hospital. That night, the police got a call, as usual; a woman, hardly able to speak, had been gassed by the madman. In less than a minute, one of the roving squad cars was at her house; she was rushed to the hospital and examined by the doctor." Ma
For a long moment Ma
I think Ma
"And that's what's happened in Santa Mira" – he nodded at the town at our feet. "The news spreads, semi-secretly at first. It's whispered around, as it was in Mattoon; someone believes her husband, sister, aunt, or uncle is actually an undetectable impostor, a strange and exciting bit of news to hear. And then – it keeps on happening. And it spreads, and there's a new case, or several, nearly every day. Hell, the Salem witch hunt, flying saucers – they're all part of this same amazing aspect of the human mind. People live lonely lives, a lot of them; these delusions bring attention and concern."