The World Next Door (A Short Story) Read online

  November 16

  No dreams last night at all. Slept well for the first time in weeks.

  I tried Jess’ sugar. Wonderful! I’d forgotten how good real sugar could be. I sprinkled some of my share on wild blueberries I picked a couple of days ago.

  November 18

  Everybody in town is saying their dreams are gone. Doc says we’ve all had a psychic trauma, but it’s over now.

  Big topic in the meeting tonight was how to ration out the meat supply. The dairymen think it’s time to rebuild their milking stock; the townies say they’re hungry for real, red meat, and since the rain’s been good, the meat will be good, too. We’ll probably compromise on this again; a lot of those bossies aren’t going to make it through the winter anyway. And it snowed like hell again today.

  November 19

  Jess came in from his farm to say he’d found a body by the side of the road on his way in. It was a stranger, shot dead where he stood; there was dried blood under him and nowhere else. Doesn’t look like a bandit attack, though; the kid still had his wallet on him. Maybe it was a hunting accident, but the mayor’s posted extra patrols, just in case it was bandits after all. We’ll go out and get the body tonight.

  November 21

  Nobody can figure it out.

  The body’s the damnedest thing anyone’s ever seen. Doc went through the kid’s ID and came up with all sorts of stuff that didn’t make any sense.

  First off, there was a lot of ID, and no one here has any anymore. The kid’s name was John David Wright. He was just about to turn twenty.

  There was a New York State driver’s license dated this year; the kid’s picture was on it. It’s a good sign things are returning to normal, if they’ve begun issuing those again. Only problem is, it doesn’t say where the seat of government was that issued it. Was it in Rensselaer or Syracuse or what?

  Wright’s home town is given as this one, but he’s a complete stranger to us. The address on his driver’s license is for a big house on Bates Road that burned down right after the war. Jess says he thinks he remembers a family named Wright who lived there around the time the war started, but they all died in the fire.

  The kid was wearing a wristwatch with numbers on it instead of hands; Fred Crawthers says it looks a lot like the watch he saw in one of his dreams. He had money, too — bills and change both — all with recent dates. I was pleased to see the mint is back in business… but there was a half-dollar coin that bore the President’s picture, which I think is overdoing it. There were also a couple of credit cards called Mastercard and Visa; it took me a while to recognize a credit card when I saw one.

  Wright also had a receipt, dated three days ago, from a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. I remember those. They were on highways and had orange roofs. But there aren’t any around here and there never were.

  Young Wright was wearing eyeglasses, but they weren’t made of glass.

  They had plastic lenses that scratch easily; Doc showed me. Doc’s been through the kid and reports nothing physically unusual except for his teeth. He’s got the usual fillings, but one of his front teeth was covered by a tough white plastic. Doc says it covered a bad crack and looked convincingly good. (I wish I knew where they were doing dental work these days. Everybody in town needs some.)

  The only other thing Doc said was that the kid was maybe too healthy.

  He had good weight on him, no obvious signs of radiation impairment, no nothing. About like we all were, before the war.

  Well, the kid may be one of ours; we don’t know. We’ll treat him right, anyway. We’ll bury him tomorrow as best we can, with all this damn snow on the ground.

  November 23

  Doc came by the house this morning, red-eyed and sleepless. He says he didn’t tell all he knew about the Wright boy, but he decided to tell me and give me the proof. I can write it down and hide the proof, as long as I don’t show it to the mayor or anyone else right away. Doc’s afraid people might panic or something. I think the people around here are stronger than that, but I’ll respect Doc’s wishes.

  Anyway, I’m not sure I believe it myself, although I’ve got it all right here in front of me. When Doc began undressing Wright’s body for autopsy, he found that the kid had wrapped himself in newspapers. It’s an old Boy Scout trick, for insulation. The kid had used six sheets from the Albany Times-Union from the 13th of November, this year. Now there is no Albany and it sure isn’t in any shape to print newspapers… but this paper was fresh and white. The sheets covering the kid’s chest are full of buckshot holes and covered with blood, but the rest of the sheets are okay.

  We have the front page, and it’s clean. The headline tells about a SOVIET ULTIMATUM. Another story says PRESIDENT URGES CIVIL DEFENSE MEASURES. A third reads POPE FLIES TO MOSCOW TO MEDIATE CRISIS. There’s also what we used to call a think-piece about the number of weapons the U.S. and the Soviet Union have and the damage they could do. The story is a horror of thousands of intercontinental missiles that carry ten or more warheads each, and there are germ bombs and chemical bombs and orbital bombs and things that carry radioactive dust.

  None of this is anything we know about, none of it. I read the ULTIMATUM story. It said the presence of missile-carrying Soviet nuclear subs off the Atlantic coast had caused the worst breach in relations between the superpowers since the Cuban missile crisis, which almost caused a war back in ’62.

  Almost. My dear sweet Jesus. Almost, it said.

  Doc says he thinks he knows what happened. The world next door, Elvis called it, and Doc says he was right.

  Doc thinks the next-door world was the one we’d be living in if there hadn’t been a war about Cuba. He says it’s a real place, or it was. Now Doc thinks it’s gone, because the dreams stopped; Doc no longer thinks the dreams were mass hysteria or any of the other things he called them.

  He says the next-door world must have had an even worse war than we did, because of those weapons in the paper. He thinks everybody died, and maybe the impending death of a whole, entire planet is enough to open a door wide enough so that dreams, and even a kid, start coming through. Maybe we were on the receiving end because we’re a nearly dead world… not quite dead, and maybe we’ll pull through, despite everything. But that other world, with those fearsome weapons, must be gone, just like the dreams it sent us.

  We don’t know who shot John David Wright, but Doc figures it was Jess himself, startled when the kid came out of nowhere without hailing Jess first.

  We could probably prove it, if it’s true, but that would only get Jess hanged, and we need him and his farm. Besides, Jess was decent enough to report the body and make sure we’d bury it with proper respect. The poor kid is dead, and we can’t bring him back. Let it lay.

  November 28

  We all got together and ate as much as we’d put aside for the feast — it turned out to be a fairly good year. All in all, it was a pretty nice Thanksgiving… except the kid’s watch won’t show any numbers anymore, and I can’t make the thing work. I guess the battery or whatever must be dead. That was the best goddamn watch I ever had, even counting the old days. It’s a shame it gave out so soon.

  David Mattingly, The World Next Door

  The End

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