Page:Weird Tales Volume 44 Number 7 (1952-11).djvu/29

not really, that is; nothing we can't handle. What was it this time?"

"Shopping! I went shopping in a darkened store, after midnight. In fact, Fred, I just returned. It's ten miles from here to the store . . ."

"And if you just came back, I can testify that you haven't left this bed since you tucked yourself in beside me last night!"

"Well, then, this time I did something, Fred. I've tried things before, but nothing ever came of it. This time I put one of my calling cards under a can of kennel ration, well back in the shelf, so that it won't likely be found right away. If we go there, before the store opens . . ."

"We'll do it, Baby," said Fred Hale. "Now, what did you buy last night, or so early this morning?"

Should she, here and now, safe in his arms, tell him about George? George Bannett, who made her forget her husband completely, the instant he walked into her dream, astral travel, whatever it was? Awake, she knew no George Bannett, nor could she find him in any Lancaster-Lititz-Columbia-Ephrate-Elizabethtown-Marietta telephone book. He wasn't therefore, real. Yet, his presents were. At least, up untilnow they always had been.

"I bought three pounds of coffee, because it's cheaper, you know," said Mary Hale. Fred turned on the light, took down what she told him. "I bought a head of cabbage, a bag of Idaho potatoes, five pounds of sugar, three cans of evaporated milk, two cans of dog-food, our usual kind, three cans of cat-food, again our usual kind, four packages of frozen mixed vegetables, two pounds of sweet potatoes, three bunches of carrots, a bag of spinach, forty cents worth of bananas, altogther, it came to five dollars and twelve cents . . ."

"And you paid cash?"

"Yes, I had to. It’s an A & P store, you know."

"That's one thing that gets me," said Fred slowly. "You always pay cash for this stuff you get somehow in the night, but no cash is ever missing from either your purse or mine. And all these stores, all through the neighborhood, which report, eerie nocturnal visitations, with unexplained cash rung up on their cash registers—and the cash in the dampers to match, and nothing stolen—report exactly the sum total you always tell me. Where does the money come from?"

Dared she tell her adored but inclined-to-be-jealous husband, that George Bannett always paid the bills? He was looking at her strangely now, preparing to answer himself somehow.

"Baby, in your dreams, where does the money come from?”

She would have been caught, flatly, if she hadn't been expecting the question.

"That's the mystery," she said. "I always know then, but never know here. I just know that the bill is always paid, in cash, and rung up on the cash register . . ."

"Maybe,” said Fred softly, "there is something you're not telling?"

"Fred!"

"No need to disturb yourself about it—is there?" he asked.

She was flustered, of course, who wouldn't have been, for in the dream, or astral journey, whatever it always was, George Bannett wasn't her husband; he was something just as intimate, though, half of a relationship that the world frowned, or affected to frown, upon. Yet that part of her weird life with George Bannett was only implied; no slightest part of it came into her nightly experience—to be remembered, anyway.

"Well," Fred was saying, "which basket did you use?"

"I apparently forgot to take a market basket," she answered quickly, "so I selected a box . . ."

"What was in the box?"

"It had held, according to the legend outside, evaporated milk . . ."

Together they rose, noted the time, two a.m., and walked downstairs to the kitchen table. Atop the kitchen table was a fiber box, on the outside of which was splashed the name of a popular brand of evaporated milk. Inside the box a careful check indicated exactly the items Mary Hale had enumerated for Fred Hale on waking, just prior to two a.m.