He watched her walk across the room and disappear into the hallway. He heard her footsteps, then the clicking of the lock on the bathroom door. With slow-motion actions he got on his feet and went into the bedroom.
He lay there in the darkness, staring at the ceiling.
Poets and philosophers could talk all they wanted about a man’s being more than fleshly form, about his essential worth, about the immeasurable stature of his soul. It was rubbish.
Had they ever tried to hold a woman with arms that couldn’t reach around her? Had they ever told another man they were as good as he—and said it to his belt buckle?
She came into the bedroom, and in the darkness he heard the crisp rustle of her robe as she took it off and put it across the foot of the bed. Then the mattress gave on her side as she sat down. She drew her legs up and he heard her head thump back softly on her pillow. He lay there tensely, waiting for something.
After a moment there was a whispering of silk and he felt her reaching hand touch his chest.
“What’s that?” she asked softly.
He didn’t say.
She pushed up on her elbow. “Scott, it’s your ring,” she said. He felt the thin chain cutting slightly into the back of his neck as she fingered the ring. “How long have you been wearing it?” she said.
“Since I took it off,” he said.
There was a moment’s silence. Then her love-filled voice broke over him.
“Oh, darling!” Her arms slipped demandingly around him, and suddenly he felt the silk-filmed heat of her body pressing against him. Her lips fell searchingly on his, and her fingertips drew in like cat claws on his back, sending spicy tingles along the flesh.
And suddenly it was back, all the forced-down hunger in him exploding with a soundless, body-seizing violence. His hands fled across her burning skin, clutching and caressing. His mouth was an open shiver under hers. The darkness came alive, a sabled aura of heat crawling on their twining limbs. Words were gone; communication had become a thing of groping pressures, a thing felt in their blood, in the liquid torments rising, sweetly fierce. Words were needless. Their bodies spoke a surer language.
And when, too soon, it had ended and the night had fallen black and heavy on his mind, he slept, content, in the warm encirclement of her arms. And for the measure of a night there was peace, there was forgetfulness. For him.
C HAPTER
S IX
He clung to the edge of the open cracker box, looking in with dazed, unbelieving eyes.
They were ruined.
He stared at the impossible sight—cobweb-gauzed, dirty, moldy, water-soaked crackers. He remembered now, too late, that the kitchen sink was directly overhead, that there was a faulty drainpipe on it, that water dripped into the cellar every time the sink was used.
He couldn’t speak. There were no words terrible enough to express the mind-crazing shock he felt.
He kept staring, mouth ajar, a vacuous look immobile on his face. I’ll die now, he thought. In a way, it was a peaceful outlook. But stabbing cramps of hunger crowded peace away, and thirst was starting to add an extra pain and dryness to his throat.
His head shook fitfully. No, it was impossible, impossible that he should have come so far to have it end like this.
“No,” he muttered, lips drawing back in a sudden grimace as he clambered over the edge. Holding on, he stretched out one leg and kicked a cracker edge. It broke damply at his touch, jagged shards of it falling to the bottom of the box.
Reckless with an angry desperation, he let go of the edge and slid down the almost vertical glossiness of the wax paper, stopping with a neck-snapping jolt. Pushing up dizzily, he stood in the crumb-strewn box. He picked up one and it disintegrated wetly in his hands like dirtengrained mush. He picked it apart with his hands, searching for a clean piece. The smell of rot was thick in his nostrils. His cheek puffed out as a spasm shook his stomach.
Dropping the rest of the scraps, he moved toward a complete cracker, breathing through his mouth to avoid the odor, his bare feet squishing over the soaked, mold-fuzzed remains.
Reaching the cracker, he tore off a crumbling fragment and broke it up. Scraping green mold from one of the pieces, he bit off part of it.
He spat it out violently, gagging at the taste. Sucking in breath between his teeth, he stood shivering until the nausea had faded.
Then abruptly his fists clenched and he took a punch at the cracker. His vision was blurred by tears, and he missed. With a snarled curse he swung again and punched out a spray of white crumbs.
“Son-of-a-bitch!” he yelled, and he kicked the cracker to bits and kicked and flung the pieces in every direction like soggy rocks.
He leaned weakly against the wax-paper walls, his face against its cool, crackling surface, his chest expanding and contracting with short, jerking breaths. Temper, temper, came the whispered admonition. Shut up, he answered it. Shut up, I’m dying.
He felt a sharp-edged bulge against his forehead and shifted position irritably.
Then it hit him.
The other side of the wax paper. Any crumbs that had fallen there would have been protected.
With an excited grunt he clawed at the wax paper, trying to tear it open. His fingers slipped on the glossy smoothness and he thudded down on one knee.
He was getting up when the water hit him.
A startled cry lurched in his throat as the first drop landed on his head, exploding into spray. The second drop smashed across his face with an icy, blinding impact. The third bounced in crystalline fragments off his right shoulder.
With a gasp, he lunged backward across the box, tripping over a crumb. He pitched over onto the carpet of cold white mush, then shoved up quickly his robe coated with it, his hands caked with it. Across from him the drops kept crashing down in a torrent, filling the box with a leaping mist that covered him. He ran.
At the far end of the box he stopped and turned, looking dizzily at the huge drops splattering on the wax paper. He pressed a palm against his skull. It had been like getting hit with a cloth-wrapped sledge hammer.
“Oh, my God,” he muttered hoarsely, sliding down the wax-paper wall until he was sitting in the mush, hands pressed to his head, eyes closed, tiny whimperings of pain in his throat.
***
He had eaten, and his sore throat felt much better. He had drunk the drops of water clinging, to the wax paper. Now he was collecting a pile of crumbs.
First he had kicked an opening in the heavy wax paper, then squeezed in behind its rustling smoothness. After eating, he’d begun to carry dry crumbs out, piling them on the bottom of the box.
That done, he kicked and tore out handholds in the wax paper so he could climb back to the top. He made the ascent carrying one or two crumbs at a time, depending on their size. Up the wax-paper ladder, over the lip of the box, down the handholds he had formerly ripped in the paper wrapping of the box. He did that for an hour.
Then he squeezed his way behind the wax-paper lining, searching for any crumbs he might have missed. But he hadn’t missed any except for one fragment the size of his little finger, which he picked up and chewed on as he finished his circuit of the box and emerged from the opening again.
He looked over the interior of the box once more, but there was nothing salvageable. He stood in the middle of the cracker ruins, hands on hips, shaking his head. At best, he’d got only two days’ food out of all his work. Thursday he would be without any again.
He threw off the thought. He had enough concerns; he’d worry about it when Thursday came. He climbed out of the box.
It was a lot colder outside. He shivered with a hunching up of shoulders. Though he’d wrung out as much as possible, his robe was still wet from the splattering drops.
He sat on the thick tangle of rope, one hand on his pile of hard-won cracker crumbs. They were too heavy to carry all the way down. He’d have to make a dozen trips at least, and that was out of the question. Unable to resist, he picked up a fi
st-thick crumb and munched on it contentedly while he thought about the problem of getting his food down.
At last, realizing there was only one way, he stood with a sigh and turned back to the box. Should use wax paper, he thought. Well, the hell with that; it was going to last only two days at the most.
With a straining of arm and back muscles, feet braced against the side of the box, he tore off a jagged piece of paper about the size of a small rug. This he dragged back to the edge of the refrigerator top and laid out flat. In the center of it he arranged his crumbs into a cone-shaped pile, then wrapped them up until he had a tight, carefully sealed package about as high as his knees.
He lay on his stomach peering over the edge of the refrigerator. He was higher off the floor now than he’d been on the distant cliff that marked the boundary of the spider’s territory. A long drop for his cargo. Well, they were already crumbs; it would be no loss if they became smaller crumbs. The package wasn’t likely to open during the fall; that was all that mattered.
Briefly, despite the cold, he looked out over the cellar.
It certainly made a difference, being fed. The cellar had, for the moment anyway, lost its barren menace. It was a strange, cool land shimmering with rain-blurred light, a kingdom of verticals and horizontals, of grays and blacks relieved only by the dusty colors of stored objects. A land of roars and rushings, of intermittent sounds that shook the air like many thunders. His land.
Far below he saw the giant woman looking up at him, still leaning on her rock, frozen for all time in her posture of calculated invitation.
Sighing, he pushed back and stood. No time to waste; it was too cold. He got behind his bundle and, stooping over, pushed the dead weight of it to the edge and shoved it over the brink with a nudge of his foot.
Momentarily on his stomach again, he watched the package’s heavy fall, saw it bounce once on the floor, and heard the crunching noise as it came to rest. He smiled. It had held together.
Standing once more, he started around the top of the refrigerator to see if there were anything he might use. He found the newspaper.
It was folded and propped against the cylindrical coil ease. Its lettered faces were covered with dust and part of the sink’s leaking had splashed water across it, blotting the letters and eating through the cheap paper. He saw the large letters OST and knew it was a copy of the New York Globe-Post, the paper that had done his story—at least as much of it as he had been able to endure.
He looked at the dusty paper, remembering the day Mel Hammer had come to the apartment and made the offer.
Marty had mentioned Scott’s mysterious affliction to a fellow Kiwani, and from there the news had drifted, ripple by ripple, into the city.
Scott refused the offer, despite the fact that they needed the money desperately. Although the Medical Center had completed the tests free of charge, there was still a sizable bill for the first series of examinations. There was the five hundred owed to Marty, and the other bills they’d accumulated through the long, hard winter—the complete winter wardrobe for all of them, the cost of fuel oil, the extra medical bills because none of them had been physically equipped to face an Eastern winter after living so long in Los Angeles.
But Scott had been in what he now called his period of furies—a time when he experienced an endless and continuously mounting anger at the plight he was in. He’d refused the newspaper offer with anger. No, thank you, but I don’t care to be exposed to the morbid curiosity of the public. He flared up at Lou when she didn’t support his decision as eagerly as he thought she should have, saying, “What would you like me to do—turn myself into a public freak to give you your security?”
Erring, off-target anger; he’d known it even as he spoke. But anger was burning in him. It drove him to depths of temper he had never plumbed before. Strengthless temper, temper based on fear alone.
Scott turned away from the newspaper and went back to the rope. Lowering himself over the edge with an angry carelessness, he began sliding down the rope, using his hands and feet. The white cliff of the refrigerator blurred before his eyes as he descended.
And the anger he felt now was only a vestigial remnant of the fury he’d lived with constantly in the past; fury that made him lash out incontinently at anyone he thought was mocking him….
He remembered the day Terry had said something behind his back; something he thought he heard. He remembered how, no taller than Beth, he’d whirled on her and told her that he’d heard what she’d said.
Heard what? she asked. Heard what you said about me! I didn’t say anything about you. Don’t lie to me. I’m not deaf! Are you calling me a liar? Yes, I’m calling you a liar! I don’t have to listen to talk like that! You do when you decide to talk about me behind my back! I think we’ve had just about enough of your screaming around here. Just because you’re Marty’s brother—Sure, sure, you’re the boss’s wife, you’re the big cheese around here. Don’t you talk to me like that!
And on and on, shrill and discordant and profitless.
Until Marty, grim, soft-spoken, called him into the office, where Scott had stood in front of the desk, glaring at his brother like a belligerent dwarf.
“Kid, I don’t like to say it,” Marty told him, “but maybe—till they get you fixed up—it’d be better if you stayed home. Believe me, I know what you’re going through, and I don’t blame you, not a bit. But… well, you can’t concentrate on work when you’re…”
“So I’m being fired.”
“Oh, come on, kid,” Marty said. “You’re not being fired. You’ll still be on salary. Not as much, of course—I can’t afford that—but enough to keep you and Lou going. This’ll be over soon, kid. And—well, Christ, the GI loan’ll be coming through any day now anyway, and then—”
Scott’s feet thudded on the top of the wicker table. Without pausing, he started across the wide expanse, lips set tightly in the thick blond wreathing of his beard.
Why did he have to see that newspaper and go off on another fruitless journey to the past? Memory was such a worthless thing, really. Nothing it dealt with was attainable. It was concerned with phantom acts and feelings, with all that was uncapturable except in thought. It was without satisfaction. Mostly it hurt….
He stood at the edge of the tabletop, wondering how he was going to get down to the hanging strap. He stood indecisively, shifting from leg to leg, wriggling the toes of the lifted foot gingerly. His feet were getting cold again. The ache in his right leg was returning, too; he’d almost forgotten it while he was collecting crumbs, the constant movement loosening and warming him. And his throat was getting sore again.
He walked behind the paint can whose handle he had grabbed before and, bracing his back against it, pushed. The can didn’t move. Turning around, he planted his feet firmly and pushed with all his strength. The can remained fixed. Scott walked around it, breathing hard with strain. With great effort, he was able to draw the handle out slightly so that it protruded over the edge of the table.
He rested for a moment, then swung over the space and dangled there until his searching feet found the strip and pressed down on it.
Cautiously he put one hand on the tabletop. Then, after a moment of feeling for balance, he let go of the paint-can handle and lowered himself quickly. His feet slipped off the ledge, but his convulsively thrusting arms caught hold of it and he clambered back on.
After a few seconds he leaped across to the spar arrangement.
The descent along the rod-spaced incline was simple; too simple to prevent the return of memories. As he slid and edged down the length of the incline, he thought of the afternoon he’d come home from the shop after the talk with Marty.
He remembered how still the apartment was, Lou and Beth out shopping. He remembered going into the bedroom and sitting on the edge of the bed for a long time, staring down at his dangling legs.
He didn’t know how long it had been before he’d looked up and seen a suit of his old clothes hanging on
the back of the door. He’d looked at it, then got up and gone over to it. He’d had to stand on a chair to reach it. For a moment he held the dragging weight of it in his arms. Then, not knowing why, he pulled the jacket off the hanger and put it on.
He stood in front of the full-length mirror, looking at himself.
That’s all he did at first, just stood looking—at his hands, lost deep in the sagging hollow of the dark sleeves; at the hem of the coat, far below his calves; at the way the coat hung around him like a tent. It didn’t strike him then; the disparity was too severe. He only stared at himself, his face blank.
Then it did strike him, as if for the first time.
It was his own coat he wore.
A wheezing giggle puffed out his cheeks. It disappeared. Silence while he gaped at his reflection.
He snickered hollowly at the child playing grownup. His chest began to shake with restrained laughs. They sounded like sobs.
He couldn’t hold them back. They poured up his throat and pushed out between shaking lips. Sobbing laughter burst out against the mirror. He felt his body trembling with it. The room began to resound with his taut, shrill laughter.
He looked at the mirror again, tears raining down his cheeks. He did a little dance step and the coat puffed out, the sleeve ends flapping. Screeching with a deranged appreciation, he flailed spastic blows against his legs, doubled over to ease the pain in his stomach. His laughter came in short, explosive, throat-catching bursts. He could hardly stand.
I’m funny. He swung the sleeve again and flopped over suddenly on his side, laughing and kicking at the floor with his shoes, the thumping sounds making him even more hysterical. He twisted around on the floor, limbs thrashing, head rolling from side to side, the choked laughter pealing from his lips, until he was too weak to laugh. Then he lay there on his back, motionless, gasping for breath, his face wet with tears, his right foot still twitching. I’m funny.
And he thought, quite calmly it seemed, about going into the bathroom and getting his razor blade and cutting his wrists open. He really wondered why he went on lying there, looking up at the ceiling, when it would solve everything if he went into the bathroom and got a razor blade and—
Richard Matheson Suspense Novels Page 5