Free Who Made Stevie Crye? by Michael Bishop Page B

typewriter’s version had been a lie. What else could it have been?
    Stevie returned to her study, but paused outside it and looked in on Teddy, whose room, a cubbyhole in comparison to Marella’s, held the chilly southwest corner of the second floor—right across the hall from Stevie’s book-lined sanctorum. Teddy was a sound sleeper, much harder to wake up than his sister, for which reason Stevie felt no compunction about subjecting him to the glare of his overhead light.
    He had thrown back the upper portion of his GE blanket and lay across the bed with his left foot dangling into space. He had also neglected, or disdained, to put on the tops of his pajamas. How he could sleep half-nude with temperatures under forty, even with his blanket securely in place, Stevie had no idea. The boy was incorrigible.
    Just like his dad, she reflected. Though Georgia-born and -bred, Ted, Sr., had taken to cold weather like a polar bear, and when it came time for bed, he had no metabolic or psychological hangups about disrobing. While shivering under the covers in long Johns and woolen socks, Stevie had sometimes thought her laconic husband capable of sleeping naked in a snowdrift.
    Young Teddy looked cold, though. His toplessness and his cast-back blanket had left him trembling, and as he trembled, he murmured unintelligible maledictions at the winter air. Indeed, one hand sought blindly for the edge of the missing blanket. Not finding it, the boy turned, moaning, to his left side.
    Stevie went into the room to cover him. He was getting to be a handsome young man, growing up with astonishing speed. A year ago he had been a kid; now he was gaining weight, putting on muscle, discovering body hair in heretofore hairless places.
    Beneath his right arm, which he had just flung over his head, Stevie could see a delicate brunet curl, a clock-spring of hair—symbolic, maybe, of his burgeoning maturity. His face still looked callow, the endearing mug of a wiseacre juvenile (its dearness a function of family connection, Stevie knew, and probably not readily evident to strangers), but his body was acquiring strength and something like an admirable classical purity. As she drew his blanket over his shoulders, Stevie kissed him lightly on the brow.
    “Night, sport.”
    After plunging his room into darkness again, she crossed the hall to her study. That damn Exceleriter. Its own spurious account of what she had done after waking to its mad electronic magic still lay on her dictionary stand. She picked up the sheet and read the story a third time. What wonderful phrases it contained: “Her clumsiness she charitably attributed” . . . “afraid to catch the Exceleriter” . . . “the percipient machine” . . . “solely because she had made a fool of herself ”—a host of casual digs that contained irritating glimmers of insight, even humor. Funny, very funny. A piece of electrically driven machinery was giving her the business.
    Where was the other story? What had she done with the semijournalistic account of yesterday morning’s nightmare? Rummaging about, Stevie found this first example of the Exceleriter’s macabre literary talent on a package of typing paper on her rolltop. She reread this single page, its playful three-part headline concluding with the astute declaration: TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNOXIOUS!!! She had called that one, hadn’t she?
    What you didn’t call, Stevie reminded herself, was the subject matter of tonight’s nightmare. You fed the machine a new strip of paper, and it outfoxed you. It wrote a brand-new story. If you want it to conclude the one it began last night, maybe you’ve got to use your head and make more careful arrangements. You’re smarter than that damned Exceleriter.
    She wondered. The Exceleriter— this Exceleriter—was lots smarter than its PDE siblings; a veritable genius. An evil genius. In fact, that was the problem. She was attempting to match wits, not with a product of PDE technology, but with