If someone was clever enough to know Alan Commager a little better than he’d known himself so far—and had motive enough not to mind killing somebody else in order to soften him up—it could have been done in just that way. And Paylar had told him openly that the motive existed.
Commager decided that that was how it had been done; though now he didn’t mind considering the possibility of a telepathic suggestion either. They might try something else, but he was quite sure that the kind of trick they had tried—whichever way it had been done—wouldn’t work at all another time. They needed his cooperation for that, and he wasn’t giving them any.
And still, aside from the fact that Wilson Knox had been threatened, nothing at all had occurred openly.
The anger in him remained. He couldn’t bring himself to feel really sorry for Knox, or for Elaine Lovelock either. They were destructive mental parasites who’d had the bad luck to run into what might be simply a more efficient parasite of the same breed. In spite of their protests, they hadn’t been any less ruthless with the people they controlled.
He could recognize that. But the anger stayed with him, a smoldering and dangerous thing, a little ugly. Basically, Commager knew, he was still angry with himself. For reasons still unknown, he had developed an area of soft rot in his thoughts and emotions; and he was reasonably convinced that, without that much to start on, the proddings and nibblings of—parasites—couldn’t have had any effect. To have reduced himself to the level of becoming vulnerable to them seemed an intolerably indecent failing, like a filthy disease.
But anger, however honestly directed where it belongs, wants to strike outward.
FOR A parasite or whatever else she might be, Paylar looked flatteringly beautiful in a sheath of silver and black—and he didn’t get a significant word out of her all evening.
Commager hadn’t tried to talk shop, but he had expected that she would. However, in that respect, it might have been simply another interesting, enjoyable but not too extraordinary night out.
In other respects, it wasn’t. He didn’t forget at any time that here was someone who probably shared the responsibility for what he was now rather certain had been, a deliberate murder. In retrospect, her promise to tell Ruth MacDonald not to frighten Knox any more hadn’t meant anything, since Knox by then had been as good as dead.
The odd thing—made much odder, of course, by the other probability that he himself had been the actual target of that killing—was that, as far as Paylar was concerned, he seemed unable to feel any convincing moral indignation about the event! It was puzzling enough so that, under and around their pleasant but unimportant conversation, he was mainly engaged in hunting for the cause of that lack of feeling.
Her physical attractiveness seemed involved in it somehow. Not as a justification for murder; he wasn’t even so sure this evening that he liked Paylar physically. He felt the attraction, but there was also a trace of something not very far from revulsion in his involuntary response to it.
It wasn’t too obvious; but she might have almost an excess of quiet vitality, a warmth and slender, soft earthiness that seemed almost more animal than human.
That thought-line collapsed suddenly. Rather, it struck Commager, as if he’d been about to become aware of something he wasn’t yet prepared to see.
HE SUDDENLY laughed, and Paylar’s short black eyebrows lifted questioningly.
“I just worked something out, Mabel!” he explained. He’d asked her earlier what her full name was, and she had told him gravely it was Mabel Jones, and that she used Paylar for business purposes only. He didn’t believe her, but, for the evening, they had settled cosily on Mabel and Alan.
“The thing that’s different about you,” he went on, “is that you don’t have a soul! So, of course, you don’t have a human conscience either!” He considered a moment. It seemed, at any rate, to reflect almost exactly how he felt about her. A cat, say, was attractive, pleasant to see and to touch; and one didn’t blame a cat for the squawking bird it had killed that afternoon. One didn’t fairly blame a cat either if, to avenge some mysterious offense, it lashed out with a taloned paw at oneself! He developed the notion to Paylar as well as he could without violating the rule against shop-talk.
The cat-woman seemed neither amused nor annoyed at his description of her. She listened attentively and then said, “You could still join us, Alan—”
“Lady,” said Commager, astonished, “there are any number of less disagreeable suggestions you could have made at this hour!” He added, “Leaving out everything else, I don’t like the company you keep.”
Paylar shrugged naked tanned shoulders. Then her gaze went past him and froze briefly.
“What’s the matter?” he inquired.
She looked back at him with a rueful smile. “I’m afraid you’re going to see a little more of my company now,” she remarked. “What time of night is it, Alan?”
COMMAGER checked. It was just past midnight, he told her, so it wasn’t surprising that this and that should have started crawling out of the woodwork. He turned his head.
“Hello, Oracle!” he said cordially. “What do you see in the tea leaves for me?”
Ruth MacDonald looked a little out of place here in a neat gray business suit. For a moment, she had also looked uncomfortably like a resurrected corpse to Commager, but she was alive enough.
She glanced at him. “I see your death,” she said unsmilingly.
Commager told her that she appeared to be in a rut, but wouldn’t she sit down and have a drink? The ice-faced young siren didn’t share Paylar’s immunity in his mind—she made his flesh crawl; she was something that should be stepped on!
Paylar stood up. “You’re fools,” she said to Ruth MacDonald without passion. She turned to Commager. “Alan, I should have told you I intended to drive back with Ruth—”
It was a lie, he thought, but he didn’t mind. The expression of implacable hostility on Ruth MacDonald’s face had been gratifying—Paylar’s friends were becoming really unhappy about him!
The gray car stood almost at the far end of the dark parking lot where he had left his own. He walked them up to it and wished them both good night with some solemnity. “You, too, Miss MacDonald!” he said, which gained him another brief glance and nothing more. Then he stepped aside to let them back out.
WHEN HE stopped moving, there was no particular psychic ability required to guess what was pushing against the back of his spine. “We’re taking the next car,” Herbert Hawkes’s voice announced gently behind him. “And I’m sure we can count on you to act reasonably this time, Mr. Commager!”
It was rather neat, at that. The gray car was moving slowly away, racing its engine. If there had been anyone in sight at the moment—but there wasn’t—a back-fire wouldn’t have created any particular excitement.
“I’m a reasonable man,” Commager said meekly. “Good evening, Mr. Barthold! I’m to take one of the back seats, I suppose?”
“That’s what we had in mind,” Hawkes admitted.
They might or might not be amateurs at this kind of thing, but they didn’t seem to be making any obvious mistakes. Lex Barthold was driving, and Commager sat in the seat behind him. Hawkes sat beside Barthold, half-turned toward Commager. The gun he held pointed at Commager’s chest lay along the top of the back-rest. From outside, if anyone happened to glance in, it would look as if the two of them were engaged in conversation.
Commager thought wistfully of his own gun, stacked uselessly away in his car. This was what came of starting to think in terms of modern witchcraft! One overlooked the simple solutions.
“I was wondering,” he suggested, “what would happen if we passed a patrol-car.”
Hawkes shrugged very slightly. “You might try praying that we do, Commager!”
WHETHER the possibility was bothering him or not, the big man didn’t look happy. And there was a set tension about the way Lex Barthold drove which indicated an equal lack of enjoyment there. Witchc
raft addicts themselves, they might feel that physical mayhem, if that was what they were contemplating, was a little out of their normal lines of activity.
Otherwise, they had brawn enough for almost any kind of mayhem, and while one needn’t assume immediately that the trip was to wind up with outright murder, their attitude wasn’t reassuring.
Meanwhile, he had been fascinated by the discovery that Hawkes sported a large, discolored bruise at the exact points of his neck and jaw where Commager had thought his fist had landed early Monday morning. Those “hallucinations” hadn’t been entirely illusory, after all!
However, that made it a little harder again to understand what actually could have happened that night. Commager’s thoughts started darting off after rather improbable explanations, such as the possibility of Ruth MacDonald’s having a twin sister or a close double who had been sacrificed then—much as Knox had been—as part of the plot to drive Alan Commager out of his mind or into his grave! He shook his head. It just didn’t seem very likely.
The one thing he could be sure of right now was that Hawkes, who mightn’t be the most genial of men at best, hadn’t appreciated that sneak punch.
They didn’t pass any patrol cars . . .
IX
HE KILLED Herbert Hawkes not a quarter of a mile away from his own Bayside cabin. The location wasn’t accidental. Once they were past the point of possible interference, with the last fifty yards of a twisting, precipitous goat-path down to the Bay behind Commager and a gun still in front of him, Hawkes took time out to explain.
“We’re counting on your being found,” he said, “and this is your own backyard, so to speak. You’ve gone fishing now and then from that spot down there, Commager. Tonight, being a little liquored up, you decided to go for a swim. Or you slipped and fell from all the way up here and died instantly.”
Commager looked at the gun. “With a couple of bullets in me?”
“I don’t think it will come to that.” Both of them, in spite of Hawkes’s bland analysis of the situation, were still as nervous, Commager suspected, as a couple of cats in a strange cellar. “But if it does—well, you ran into a couple of rough characters out here, and they shot you and threw you in! Of course, we’d prefer to avoid that kind of complication.”
He paused as if expecting some comment. They both stood about eight feet away, looking at Commager.
The Moon was low over the Bay, but it was big, and there was plenty of light for close-range shooting. This was a lumpy shelf of rock, not more than twenty by twenty feet, long and wide; the path dropped off to the right of it to another smaller shelf and ended presently at the water’s edge, where there was a wet patch of sand when the tide was out.
The only way up from here was the path they’d come down by, and the two stood in front of that. He couldn’t read Barthold’s expression just now, but Hawkes was savagely tense—a big man physically confident of himself, mentally prepared for murder, but still oddly unsure and—expectant!
THE EXPLANATION struck Commager suddenly: they were wondering whether he wasn’t going to produce some witchcraft trick of his own in this emergency! It was such an odd shifting of their original roles that it startled a snort of rather hysterical mirth from him; and Hawkes, in the process of handing the gun to Barthold, tried to jerk it back, and then Commager moved.
He didn’t move toward Hawkes but toward Barthold, who seemed to have a better hold on the gun. They might have thought he was after it, too, because Hawkes let go and swung too hastily at him, as Barthold took a step back. Commager slammed a fist into Barthold’s body, swung him around between Hawkes and himself, and struck hard again. The gun didn’t even go off.
He had no more time then for Barthold, because Hawkes rammed into him with disconcerting solidness and speed. In an instant, it was like fighting a baboon, all nails and muscles and smashing fists and feet. The top of Hawkes’s skull butted his mouth like a rock. Commager hit him in the back of the neck, was free for a moment and hit again. Hawkes stepped back, straightening slightly, and Commager followed and struck once more, in the side. Then Hawkes disappeared.
It was as sudden as that! Realization that he was stumbling on the edge of the rock shelf himself came together with a glimpse of the thundering white commotion of surf almost vertically beneath him—a good hundred and fifty feet down.
With a terrible trembling still in his muscles, he scrambled six feet back on the shelf and glared wildly around for Lex Barthold. But his mind refused to turn away from the thought of how shockingly close he had come to going over with Hawkes; so a number of seconds passed before he grasped the fact that Barthold also was nowhere in sight.
COMMAGER’S breathing had slowed gradually, while he stared warily up the trarl to the left. The noise of the water would have covered any sounds of either stealthy withdrawal or approach; but since Barthold seemed to have preferred to take himself and the gun out of the fight, it was unlikely he would be back.
On the other hand, there were a number of points on that path where he could wait for Commager to come within easy range, while he remained out of immediate physical reach himself.
To the right, the trail led down. Commager glanced in that direction again and, this time, saw the gun where it had dropped into the loose shale of the shelf.
Lex Barthold was lying on his back among the boulders of the next shelf down, his legs higher than his head, the upper part of his body twisted slightly to one side. He had fallen only nine feet or so, but he wasn’t moving. They looked at each other for a moment; then Commager safetied the gun and put it in his pocket. He went on down.
“Hawkes went over the edge,” he said, still rather dazed. “What happened to you?”
Barthold grunted. “Broke my back!” He cursed Commager briefly. “But you’re a dead man, too, Commager!”
“Neither of us is dead yet,” Commager told him. He felt physically heavy, cold and tired. He hesitated and added, “I’m going to go and get help for you.” Barthold shook his head slowly. “You won’t get back up there alive. We’ve made sure of you this time . . .” He sounded matter-of-factly certain of it, and if he felt any concern about what would happen now to himself, there was no trace of it in his voice.
Commager stared down at him for a moment wondering, and then looked around.
SURF CRASHED rhythmically below them; the Moon seemed to be sliding fast through clouds far out over the Bay. Overhead, the broken, sloping cliffs might conceal anything or anybody. The feeling came strongly to him then that in this savage and lonely place anything could happen without affecting the human world at all or being noticed by it.
The night-lit earth seemed to shift slowly and giddily about him and then steadied again, as if he had, just then, drifted far beyond the boundaries of the reality he knew and were now somewhere else, in an area that followed laws of its own, if it followed any laws at all.
When he looked at Barthold again, he no longer felt the paradoxical human desire to find help for a man who had tried to kill him and whom he had nearly killed. He could talk in Barthold’s own terms.
He bent over him. “What makes you so sure your friends have got me?”
Barthold gave him a mocking glance, but he didn’t answer.
They weren’t certain, Commager thought, straightening up. They were just hoping again! That something was preparing against him was an impression he’d gained himself, almost like the physical sensation of a hostile stirring and shifting in the air and the rocks about him, a secretive gathering of power. But they weren’t certain!
“I think,” he said slowly, “that I’ll walk away from here when I feel like it.” He paused, and added deliberately, “You people might last longer if you didn’t try to play rough, Barthold! Except, of course, with someone like Wilson Knox.”
BARTHOLD spoke with difficulty. “The reason you’re still alive is that Paylar and I were the only ones who would believe you were a natural of the new mind. The first one here in twenty-three y
ears—” His breath seemed to catch; his face twisted into a grimace of pain. “But tonight they all know that ordinary controls won’t work on you, Commager! That’s what makes it too late for you.”
Commager hesitated. He said gently, “When did you and Paylar discover I was a natural of the new mind?”
“Sunday night, of course!” Barthold was plainly anxious now to keep him here. He hurried on, “The mistake was made five years ago. You should have been destroyed then, before you had learned anything, not placed under control!”
Commager’s eyes widened slightly. Until that statement, he had given only a fraction of conscious attention to what Barthold was saying, the greater part of his mind alert to catch those wispy, not-quite-physical indications that something unhealthy was brewing nearby in the night. But five years ago!
“Paylar made me an offer to join your group,” he pointed out. “Wouldn’t that have been satisfactory?”
Barthold stared up at him. His mouth worked, but for a few seconds he made no audible reply.
“Don’t wait!” he said with startling, savage intensity. “Now, or . . .” The words thickened and slurred into angry, incomprehensible mutterings. The eyelids closed.
Commager bent down and prodded Barthold’s shoulder with a forefinger. The man might be dying—those last words hadn’t sounded as if they were addressed to him—but there were things he had to know now. “What are you, Barthold? Aren’t you a natural, too?”
Barthold’s eyes opened and rolled toward him, but remained unpleasantly unfocused. “Old mind—” the thick voice mumbled. And then clearly, “You’re a fool, Commager! You didn’t really know anything! If the others—”
The eyes closed again.
Old mind . . . That still told him nothing. “Are the others of the old mind?”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 54