The Eighth Circle

by Stanley Ellin

  “I know what you mean,” Harlingen said, and, strangely enough, he sounded sympathetic. “But you’re going about this the wrong way, Murray.”

  “Let me worry about that,” Murray said.

  Ruth looked from him to Harlingen and back again, measuring them, making up her mind. “All right, I’ll go with you,” she said, “and for one reason only. I want to see how you handle the rest of this performance. It’s been so dramatic and touching up to now I’d hate to spoil it for you.”

  “It gets better as it goes along,” Murray told her.

  Eighth Avenue was a rain-washed void; the side street was as barren of life and even darker. The single bright spot on it was the OOMS FOR ENT sign, which had been draped with a holly wreath, and which sent out a flickering blue track of light across the glistening sidewalk.

  Murray bore down on the doorbell with a heavy thumb, not releasing it until the old man opened the door and stood there squinting at them in the dimness of the vestibule. He was dressed in long woolen underwear which gaped open between the buttons showing white hairs on a scrawny chest, and he was barefooted. “You don’t belong here,” he said. “Ought to call the cops. Know what time it is?”

  “I know what time it is,” Murray said. “I want to talk to Helene. Tell her Arnold Lundeen sent me. Tell her to get ready for some bad news.”

  He had been right when he had told Harlingen that Helene could take care of anything that came her way. She had the vocabulary-made even fouler and more violent by the way she spat out the words at Ruth, giving them meaning instead of using them as mere punctuation for what she had to say. She had the temper, so that Murray warily kept close to her, knowing that if it exploded full force somebody was going to get hurt. And she had the letters, a shoe box half full of Lundeen’s letters, which, in the long run, was all she needed.

  They were not well written, they were full of misspellings, but they were, in their way, masterpieces of direct statement.

  Baby I wish I was with you tonite because then we would …

  Helene baby sometime I can’t sleep because I think about you and what we could be doing. We could …

  I bet you miss me plenty. I bet right now you would like me to …

  When this troubel is over we will make up for it plenty baby. We will chase the old man out for 24 hrs and then we will…

  There was nothing perverse in the letters, Murray saw. Nothing a psychopathologist would raise an eyebrow at. Lundeen was, in fact, singularly unimaginative about his desires and his expression of them. But even the unimaginative can provide an impact when it is set down in the explicit language that Lundeen used. Ruth looked at one letter too many. Then she wildly ripped it across, ripped it again, shredded it as if that would obliterate it completely.

  Murray got an arm around Helene’s waist just as her hand caught at Ruth’s hair, grasping it, pulling the head down. He managed to force the fingers back and loosen their grip so that Ruth staggered free, and then he found that he had a fight on his hands. Helene was wearing only a flimsy nightgown. With his arms locked around her he could feel the muscles bunch under it, had to ward off the knee kicking up at him, had to avoid the sharp white teeth trying to tear at his shoulder, his cheek. She fought him, cursing him steadily, while the old man stood there useless, staring at them with blank eyes and scratching his chest vacantly as he stared. It might have taken a minute—two minutes—before the girl was wrestled into the bedroom, the door slammed shut against her, and the key turned in the lock.

  When Murray looked around, Ruth was gone.

  20

  He ran through the hall calling her name, dimly aware of specters in nightclothes who hung over the banister of the staircase above him, following him with avid eyes. Ruth was not in sight on the street. He looked up and down its emptiness, his heart hammering, and then, at a guess, raced toward Eighth Avenue. Luck was on his side. He saw her half a block away on the avenue, walking rapidly, her head bent against the driving rain. He caught up with her near the corner and grabbed her arm, swinging her around to face him.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he said. “What kind of fool trick is this?”

  She looked at him dazedly. Her coat was open, her dress soaked, her hair a wet tangle. “I’m all right,” she said. “Let me be.”

  “Sure, you’re all right. You look like something that was fished out of the river. Come on, let’s get back to the car and go home.”

  “No.” She tried to pull away from him, but yielded when he would not relinquish his grip. “Don’t you understand? They always wake up when I come in late, and talk about everything. I don’t want that now.”

  “You mean you’d rather walk around the streets until you meet up with some hoodlums? Suppose you’re not as lucky as you were back in school? They could leave you with a lot more than this to remember them by.”

  He touched a finger to the scar at the corner of her mouth, and she shrank back. “How do you know about that?” she whispered. “Who told you?”

  “Nobody told me. Or maybe you did, a dozen different ways. But what does it matter? Let’s go home and settle it some other time.”

  “I told you I didn’t want to go home.”

  “Well, where else is there to go?” he asked. Then he said with deliberate cruelty, “How about my place? That’s a thought, isn’t it? We could go up there and celebrate the post-mortem with a few drinks and have a real ball. Does that sound better to you than home or the hoodlums?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  It was what he wanted, but not this way. Unexpectedly and shockingly she was telling him that the game was over and that it was all his, but he had the outraged feeling that her tone of indifference, her sudden, incredible surrender was somehow cheating him out of his triumph. What he had fallen in love with was a woman of flesh and blood, of fine-drawn nerves and taut fibers, a whole woman who mixed humor with anger, grace with temper. What he was being offered as a trophy was the shadow of all this. He would have to be a fool to imagine it was anything more.

  In the face of that, he wondered, what was he to do? Take her to her home, and shut the door against her and temptation together for the time being? But what would happen once the door was shut? What were the chances of its ever being opened to him again? What would she feel tomorrow when she was no longer alone with him in this empty and unreal night world which was made to order for illogic?

  He stood in torment, afraid to answer his own questions, knowing he had to, one way or the other, but afraid to, afraid to move this way or that, caught in the middle, hung up by the thumbs, as Wykoff would say, and feeling the chill of the rain and of his own fears oozing through to his marrow. Not even sense enough to come in out of the rain, he thought in bleak self-mockery, and pulled Ruth, unresisting, into the shelter of a doorway. “Did you think I meant it?” he asked her, inwardly pleading with her to say no, to solve the problem that way and let things be as they were. “Did you really think I meant it?”

  “Yes,” she answered, “I thought you did.”

  The sidewalk before them was a series of puddles, and a traffic light on the corner, a solemn robot directing nonexistent traffic, turned them into pools of red and then green and then red again as Murray watched.

  “All right,” he said at last, “you wait here. I’ll have the car around in a minute.”

  The lobby of the St. Stephen had long since been deserted by the banqueters when they entered it. A few charwomen swung mops back and forth over the marble floor and paid them no attention, Nelson behind the desk looked up from a stack of index cards he was sorting and then discreetly looked down again, and the elevator man put aside his Daily News and piloted them upward in tactful silence. It gave Murray the feeling, as it had on similar occasions, that a genteel conspiracy was being carried out on his behalf, but this time, unlike the others, he was annoyed by that.

  In the apartment he drew off Ruth’s coat and found it spongy-wet in his hands. She was pr
obably wet to the skin, he conjectured, and wondered how to tell her to get out of her clothes and into something dry without making it sound like a ridiculous overture to seduction. He had made up his mind to follow her lead, to play the Dutch uncle as readily as the billy goat if that was what she wanted, but now he found himself faced by an idiotic impasse which made either role seem untenable. If it were anyone else but Ruth, he knew, it would be funny.

  He temporized by saying, “I guess you could stand that drink now, couldn’t you? Anything special you use?”

  “No,” Ruth said, “I don’t want anything. It would make me sick.” She leaned forward a little, supporting herself with a hand on the phonograph cabinet. “There’s something wrong with me. I feel cold. I’m freezing.”

  He was no expert, but it didn’t need an expert’s eye to see that there was something very wrong with her. Her skin was taking on a leaden pallor, her lips turning a deathly blue under it, and she was shuddering fitfully, trying to fight against it with her eyes closed and her teeth clenched, but not succeeding. “I’m so cold,” she gasped, and when he got an arm around her, her weight sagging against him, he could hear her teeth chattering. “Oh, God, I’m so cold.”

  The tab of the zipper at the back of her dress was lost somewhere under a fold of the collar. He fumbled for it with fingers as numb as if they had been anesthetized, cursing it and every other maddening device like it, and finally managed to rip it down its full length, pulling the dress from her as it fell apart to the hem, pulling off her sodden shoes almost with the same motion of his hand. Half-dragging, half-carrying her, he got her into the bathroom, shoved open the door of the stall shower, and turned on the hot-water tap full force. The water jetted down in a blast of steam. He felt the scalding pain of it on his arm from a remote distance, turned on cold water to lessen the heat, and pushed Ruth under the shower, holding her there, supporting her with one hand, forcing her head down with the other, while the steaming spray drenched him blindingly.

  It was rough treatment, but effective. When he finally turned the water off and released her she leaned back weakly against the wall of the shower, but with fatigue and not sickness now, her chest heaving, her skin no longer that terrifying ashen gray, but colored by the glow of returning warmth. Like that, her hair in dark, dripping strands, her brassière and step-ins plastered wetly to her body, her stockings held by some kind of garter-belt contrivance which drew taut lines against the milky-white flesh of her thighs, she was far more disturbing to Murray than he had bargained for. Far more disturbing, he surmised, than if she were naked and ready for his embrace. And wasn’t she herself aware of that?

  Apparently not. Because when he said brusquely, “How do you feel now?” she made a wry face, obviously ashamed of her weakness, and just as obviously not concerned with the appearance she made before him. “Better,” she said. “Almost human.”

  “Should I call the doctor? There’s one right downstairs.”

  “No, I really am better. Just a little weak in the knees, that’s all.” Her lips quirked in a pale smile. “You must think I’m pretty much of a mess, don’t you?”

  He had no intention of yielding to the smile. “Maybe I do,” he said, and turned away from her stricken face to take a bath sheet from its rack and hand it to her. “I guess you can be left to yourself now. Get out of those things and wrap up in this while I dig up something for you to wear. I’ll wait for you inside.”

  He left her holding the bath sheet, looking after him with a clouded expression, and the expression was with him when he went into the bedroom and pulled off his own soaking-wet shirt and undershirt. Well, what did she expect him to do, he asked of the Unseen. Take her then and there? Make a martyr out of her on the spot, so that she could get it over with, once and for all? He swept the litter of telephone messages from the bed, crushing them in his fist and flinging them aside, and then dragged the bedspread loose and dried himself with it, rubbing his back and chest hard until he struck a painful spot in the ribs. In the mirror it showed as a beautifully drawn bruise, the exact shape of Caxton’s heel, and the sight of it added more fuel to the fire Murray felt kindling in him. It was a dangerous fire, he knew, recognizing the symptoms of roaring temper unleashed by a host of grievances, and he reveled in it, stoking it furiously, feeling it engulf him and make him godlike.

  In the living room there was another fire to attend to. She was going to get the royal treatment, no less. Glowing embers to poke at prettily, soft music for the nerves and hard drink for the blood, and never let it be said that Kirk didn’t know how to rig up a production when it was called for. He scraped aside the residue of ashes and charred wood from the center of the fireplace, using a convenient log for the purpose, but when he straightened up from his labors the leering face of Frank Conmy was there, watching from the shadows, and the ghosts of women Frank had known in his virile years, women as doll-faced as Mona Dowd, coy and languorous, waiting for the inevitable before the hissing flames, and the shade of Didi sprawled there snoring unmusically—the whole crew on hand for the performance when Ruth would walk in, a virgin for the immolation, the altar ready, the priest armed—

  With all the strength he could summon up he hurled the log into the fireplace. It drove into the ashes, whirling them up in a gust of powder around him, smashed into brick and mortar with the explosive crash of cannon fire, rebounded into the fire screen, knocking it over with a great, resounding clatter. The room was full of noise—shattering, deafening, soul-satisfying noise—and then out of its last echoes he heard Ruth’s voice behind him. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

  He wheeled to face her. She had the huge towel wrapped tight around her from shoulders to knees and was clutching it to her breast with both hands, a smaller towel was wound around her hair in a turban, and her eyes were wide with alarm. She was the most unbelievably vulnerable thing he had ever seen in his life—the doe ready for the taking, and yet dead and gone forever once you’ve taken it—and the realization triggered the full explosion in him.

  “Wrong!” he said hoarsely. “God Almighty, you ask me that? It’s you! You’re what’s wrong!”

  “What are you so angry about?” Ruth said in bewilderment. “All I meant—”

  He cut her short with a furious gesture. “You think you’re not wrong? You think I can find it in me to blame Arnold for that girl? The hell I can. I pity him. I’ve never even been near him, and if I was I’d hate his lying face on sight, but, Jesus, how I pity him for what you’ve been putting him through! A big, healthy animal like that stuck on the Snow Maiden. That’s the picture, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” Ruth said desperately. “I don’t understand why you’re acting like this. You’re being irrational.”

  “Oh, no, I’m not. I’m being so rational that it hurts. I’m cutting right down to where it bleeds, because this is going to be settled here and now. Tell me something. You’ve never in your life let any man handle you, have you? Not even Arnold.”

  She looked at him stunned. “Am I supposed to be ashamed of that?”

  “No, it can be a policy with a lot of merit to it. But what made you change your mind about it? You knew what your coming up here meant. Why did you do it?”

  “I wanted to.”

  “You wanted to,” Murray said scornfully. “Isn’t that a wonderful break for me? All I do is say the word, and everything that’s been coming to Arnold all these years is mine to collect. But why not? I’m smarter than Arnold, no matter how you look at it. He never did understand why you were the Snow Maiden, did he? No, like any ignorant character out of the gutter, he thought that’s the way a woman is when she’s a well-bred, high-toned intellectual. She’s purer, somehow. Her glands don’t function like ordinary people’s. Maybe after she’s married she’ll warm up—you can hope for that, anyhow—but until then all you can do is hang around and admire her and keep other men away.

  “That was what you used him for, wasn’t it? You had the h
orrors after what happened in that school basement, you had a permanent case of nerves worked up over it, but Arnold made it easy to live with. He didn’t make any demands on you himself, because he was so damn awe-struck by your fine ways, and he was a living guarantee that no other man would make demands either. He even made it easy for you to lie to yourself about it. After all, he was the one who saved you, you owed him something, so what better way to pay him off than with the kind of loyalty you can use as a chastity belt? Isn’t that what it amounts to? Isn’t that the God’s honest truth about that ring you’re wearing?”

  He was shouting now, advancing on her as his voice lashed at her, but she made no move to retreat. She seemed rooted to the spot, staring at him as if he were a golem approaching her, menacing and inescapable. It was only when he grasped her arms that she reacted, and, unwilling to release her hold on the towel, she strained away from him, her face anguished, her body arching back so that if he had suddenly let go his hold she would have fallen.

  “It’s not true!” she gasped. “It’s not true!”

  “Stop lying to yourself! It is true! You know it is!” He shook her hard as she moved her head back and forth in blind denial, and the turban knotted around her hair loosened and fell to the floor, the hair tumbling to her shoulders. Holding her like that, seeing her like that, he had an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, of having lived through this before in some obscene, almost forgotten dream, until he remembered that the first time he had seen Helene it was like this, her hair spread wet on her shoulders, her body half-revealed by the towel wrapped around it, and knew that the mastery over Lundeen, over Ruth Vincent, over Fate he had felt then was far away now. Out of hand. Gone. “It is true!” he pleaded in his agony to recapture it. “Tell me it is!”

  “If that’s what you want me to say, yes! Now let me go. Please, let me go. You’re hurting me.”

  He shook her again as she writhed in his grip. “Don’t make it sound as if I’m putting words in your mouth. Say it so that I know you mean it.”