Page:Fantastic Volume 08 Number 01.djvu/17

 I came home; then we could talk.

Right now the thing to do was to get down to the office. I had a job to hold, peddling one-minute commercials, twenty-second transcriptions, thirty-second recordings for station-breaks in a world of hard-sell which had nothing to do with last night's fantasy of dancing death. So it was time to face today's reality. Out, damned spot-announcement.

I adjusted my tie, picked up my coat, slung it over my arm, kissed Roxie good-bye at the door, and made my exit.

It wasn’t until I was halfway down the stairs that I put my coat on, and I was actually striding through the foyer of the apartment lobby before I became conscious of the unaccustomed bulk inside the jacket.

That's when I pulled out the long, shallow, black velvet box. It was utterly empty, but utterly real.

And that, of course, is when the nightmare began again. Not in darkness, this time, but in broad daylight—the harsh, acrid, smog-obscured daylight of what, in Los Angeles, passes for reality.

So I didn't go to the office after all. I phoned them from a public cubicle at the corner, and then I boarded a Sunset bus. That's right, a bus; everybody drives in L.A., but I'm the lone exception—have been, ever since that night out on the desert when the car rolled over.

Right now the car was rolling over again, and the little silver skeleton was jangling, and I wanted to run home to Roxie and bury myself in her arms. But you can't go home again, and you can't tell the woman you love that everything is a nightmare and she is only a part of it. You can't seek reality through a mother-substitute.

Dr. Wagram had made that perfectly clear. And that's why I had to go to him now.

I took the 91 bus not far from Angel's Flight and rode past the new County buildings on Hill. All the while I kept a tight grip on that damned black velvet box, because it was a part of reality now. I had to keep my grip on reality until I reached Dr. Wagram. He could explain things to me; there must be an explanation, and I wasn't going to start screaming right here in a public bus.

And I forced myself to stare out at Los Angeles, though that didn't reassure me very much. For fantasy is THE SCREAMING PEOPLE