What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

by Henry Farrell

  “I must go,” said Charlotte in an oddly quiet way. “I realize now…”

  “I’m so glad,” Miriam said. “I felt certain you would sooner or later.”

  “Yes,” said Charlotte, and then looked away so Hugh and Miriam could not see her expression, she added, “I should have seen it before. But I didn’t know…”

  Miriam gave Hugh a quick glance. “You didn’t know what?”

  “That John wanted me to. But now, after last night…”

  Miriam stared at Hugh disbelievingly. This seemed to be proof that Charlotte most certainly was mad.

  Downstairs, Velma, who had been eavesdropping, went to the phone to tell Paul Selvin, who had paid her to do so, that Charlotte had finally decided to leave the house.

  Miriam and Hugh were engaged in a hasty discussion as Charlotte left the room. Was Charlotte up to something, or had she really decided to leave? They would simply have to wait and see.

  “But I won’t leave in the daylight for them all to stare and crow over me,” Charlotte said vehemently. “They’re not the ones who’re making me leave… it’s because of Jewel. Tonight, I’ll go when it’s dark, when they won’t see, I’ll just vanish…” She turned to Miriam. “You’ll drive me, won’t you?”

  “Yes, of course,” Miriam said. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Where it’s sunny. Where it’s warm. Remember that little town down on the gulf where Grandma used to live?”

  “I was never there.”

  “Oh, weren’t you? Never mind. We’ll find it.”

  “I know,” said Hugh sotto voiced. “I know where she means.”

  Miriam looked back at Charlotte and smiled. “We’ll leave tonight, then, after supper.”

  “Yes,” echoed Charlotte, “after supper. I’ll just vanish. I’ll just leave this place as it is… to the jackals…”

  “I suppose,” said Miriam worriedly, “I’d better pack my bags.”

  That evening as they sat down to the dinner that Velma had left for them, Miriam watched Charlotte nervously, uncertain as to whether she would change her mind again or not. Since the food that Velma left was poor, she went to the kitchen, found her way to the wine cellar and returned with a bottle of champagne. Miriam had always had champagne tastes; and Charlotte, in her deepening depression, could use some cheering up. Miriam opened the bottle and took it out to Charlotte on the terrace.

  “I never did have a good head for liquor,” said Charlotte. “Don’t you remember?”

  “Just a little won’t hurt,” Miriam suggested. “Besides, there’s cause to celebrate.”

  As they finished the bottle, Charlotte became visibly tipsy. Miriam saw and urged her to “Just eat a bite or two.”

  Charlotte left the table and went back into the house. For a moment she stood looking down the length of the hallway. Then, not so very gracefully, spilling a little of her wine, she did a deep curtsy.

  “How nice,” she said, in a light, girlish voice, “How nice of you all to come to my little party…”

  “Charlotte,” Miriam called, entering from the terrace.

  “Oh,” said Charlotte, smiling back at her, “I’m just funnin’. Don’t you worry ’bout me…”

  “I’d better go get things ready,” Miriam said. With a quizzical glance at Charlotte she went on up the stairs. In the hallway, Charlotte gave a little laugh and offered her hand to some imaginary swain. Then she meandered room to room reliving moments from the past—at first the happy ones in which she was the pretty daughter of adoring parents. She stopped long enough to enact with her father just enough to give a hint of a kind of “conversational” incest. She could always get anything she wanted from a man… or so she had been led to believe. And she could get any man.

  “John…” she murmured the name and whirled about. It was as if he was there before her. She reached out and took his hand.

  “If anyone sees you!” she said in girlish delight. “If Jewel should find out… She acts so nicey-nice and lady-like, but you know how she is… married to her…”

  Charlotte ran along the hallway as if leading John, drawing him into the shadowed shallows of the music room.

  “Oh, if anyone knew! If Daddy knew! Oh, I hate to think… No, no, you mustn’t kiss me here. Anybody might come along. If they do, you go straight over to the piano and start playin’, like that was what you came in here for…”

  She smiled softly to herself. “Oh, you’re so silly comin’ here this way… for the help to see… but I’m glad… Glad! Oh, John, I don’t care anything about any of those silly, silly boys that come around. When I see them, and then I look at you… your handsome, handsome face and your beautiful hands…”

  She stopped suddenly, her hands outstretched as if to take his, and then as some other vision rose before her, she groaned and covered her face as she whirled out of the room.

  On the upper landing, Miriam appeared hastily, having carried out some boxes from Charlotte’s room. She called down to her, but heedless and crying now, Charlotte was only intent upon fleeing the terrible vision that confronted her there in the ballroom. She hurried toward the big front door, desperate now to be away and out of the house. Again Miriam called her name, but Charlotte was too upset to hear. Tugging at the door, Charlotte rushed outside.

  As she started across the wide front veranda, a figure loomed monstrously and suddenly before her. She cried out, and there was a terrible blinding flash of light before her. In the black wake of the flash, Paul Selvin came forward, smug now at having gotten his picture.

  “Miss Hollis,” he said, “I’m sorry if I frightened you.”

  Sobbing in terrible panic, aware of some other flashing lights on the drive, Charlotte ran back inside the house, slamming and bolting the door before leaning against it, too terrified for the moment to move. Miriam, a box clutched in her arms, came awkwardly to the top of the stairs.

  “Charlotte!” she cried. “What happened?”

  Outside the flashing lights in the drive proved to be the headlights of Hugh’s car. He came to a stop and, having witnessed the hasty drama at the door, got out and went immediately to Paul. Cutting him off from escape and struggling with him, Hugh took and smashed his camera.

  Inside Miriam continued to stare down at Charlotte. “Charlotte,” she said, “please…”

  Charlotte turned from the door, trying to control her sobs and looked up at Miriam. She tried to speak, to say what happened, but she was unable to form the words.

  “All right. All right,” said Miriam. She started to put down the box, but it slipped and as she made a grab for it the lid, the box, now turned to its side, fell open.

  Charlotte looked up at the opened box and its exposed contents and her sobs were stilled by a new and even worse terror, for there, before her, grinning down from the top of the stairs was a horrible severed head. As she stared, unable in her terror either to move or to make any sound, the head tumbled from the box and fell to the stairs, and descended a ghastly jouncing descent to the bottom of the steps across the floor to her very feet. Then sucking in a deep, convulsive breath, Charlotte gave vent to a deafening scream.

  From above, Miriam looked down in frightened horror, and crying Charlotte’s name, hurled the box from her and started running down the stairs.

  As Charlotte woke up in her darkened bedroom, she felt an instantaneous sense of panic, of half-memory of the shocking experience she had downstairs.

  “Don’t be frightened,” a voice said, and she looked around and saw Miriam sitting beside the bed in the dim lamplight. And then, her gaze moved past and beyond Miriam and fastened on something else in the deeper shadows. She rose up in the bed in terror for the severed head seemed to be here on the bureau, grinning back at her.

  Miriam, realizing what was frightening her, hastened to assure her. “No, no,” she said, “it’s all right,” as she reached behind her and brought the “head” into the light as it materialized as an old hat form. “This is all it is, Charl
otte. I know how it must have frightened you…”

  Charlotte turned her head to the pillow, crying softly.

  “It was that idiot, exploding that flash bulb in your face. You couldn’t be sure of anything.”

  Miriam took a pill from a bottle and along with some water from a glass, offered it to Charlotte. At first Charlotte refused, but when Miriam insisted that Hugh said for her to take it if she woke up, she hesitantly swallowed it down.

  Charlotte looked at Miriam with a curious expression, as if seeing her for the first time, and then, giving up the struggle to stay awake, drifted off into sleep again.

  Miriam, making sure that Charlotte was resting comfortably, left the room and went back to her own room, took out the gun from the nightstand and thoughtfully checked it to make certain it was loaded.

  In the morning Charlotte was awakened by Miriam coming into the room with her breakfast tray. At first she unquestionably allowed Miriam to arrange her position in the bed and put the tray out for her. Then finally, now fully awake, she asked, “Didn’t Velma come this morning?”

  “I called her and told her not to last night,” Miriam told her. And at her questioning glance added, “If it hadn’t been for her that reporter wouldn’t have been here last night. And you wouldn’t be in this condition this morning.”

  Charlotte watched Miriam with a curious kind of thoughtfulness, and then when Miriam started to leave, called out to stop her. “Miriam,” called Charlotte, and in her indisputable look of illness was a new kind of softness, “I know you weren’t happy in this house. I wasn’t very kind to you.”

  “You were very wrapped up with yourself and all your beaux,” replied Miriam.

  “Yes. I believed all the things Daddy told me… about how beautiful I was. And charming…”

  “You were beautiful,” said Miriam. “Yes… and charming, too.”

  “But not quite legendary… I know… I did terrible wicked things. Stealing another woman’s husband…”

  “Undoubtedly, he wanted to be stolen.”

  “Yes, yes, I suppose so. Still I was wrong. But I’ve paid for it. It’s been my sense of guilt that’s kept me here so much as anything.”

  “Guilt?” questioned Miriam.

  “For causing it all.”

  “You mustn’t think about it… not now.”

  “But Miriam, I didn’t do it. I’ve never said that to anyone before, not to any other living soul. I started to say it to Daddy, but he wouldn’t let me. He said I mustn’t say it. And I mustn’t let them drive me off.”

  “But now,” started Miriam.

  “But now it’s all gone. We’re old, all of us grown old… Jewel… and me. But you… you escaped.”

  “I ran,” said Miriam. “It’s a very good policy. I’ve learned to run when your life’s threatened.”

  For a moment the two women were silent, looking at each other. Finally Charlotte held out her hand. “I’m trying to say I’m sorry, Miriam,” she said.

  Miriam nodded, “Yes, I know.”

  “You won’t leave me here alone will you?”

  Miriam shook her head. “No, I won’t do that.”

  Charlotte smiled, rather wanly, and turned to her breakfast.

  “You’ll see everything differently,” Miriam said, “once you’re away from here.”

  Hugh visited Charlotte later that day and gave her another shot to help her rest, coming into the room to speak to Miriam.

  “There is no question about it,” he said. “She’s very affected by what’s happened. She is in very deep shock.”

  “I was so certain she was going to leave,” Miriam said with resignation.

  Charlotte in the grip of the sedative babbled about the past, talked to John and spoke of her love for him all that day. In the evening she was roused by Miriam to take some soup, and then was left alone as Miriam went on to her own bedroom. Late in the night Charlotte woke up hearing the music, the song that John wrote for her. At first, confident that she was dreaming, she only smiled, but then, becoming more awake, the music still sounding dimly against her awareness, she boosted herself up in bed. Her door was open and there was a faint light outside. The music seemed to be getting louder.

  Still dazed with drugged sleep, Charlotte managed to get herself out of bed. Half fearfully, she made her way toward the open doorway and looked outside. The music was still playing somewhere below, but as she moved out to the landing, it stopped. She started to move away but the music started again.

  Charlotte looked back in the direction of Miriam’s room, saw the lamp burning beside the bed and moved toward it. She went to the room and softly called Miriam’s name, but the room was empty. She started away and then, seeing the gun in the circle of light beneath the lamp, she stood staring at it, seeing it as a glittering and a marvelous thing. Slowly, she went across to the bedside table and picked up the gun. She stood for a moment longer looking at it, and then, hearing the music again from downstairs, she carried it with her, forgotten, in her hand, from the room and out in the direction of the stairs.

  In the moment after she left, Miriam appeared in the doorway of the adjoining bath, looked into the room, and seeing nothing and hearing nothing went back inside.

  As Charlotte descended the stairs, she seemed to do so in a haze of confused fantasy. Her nightmares swirling around her, she seemed almost to become younger with every step. Only the revolver in her hand robbed the scene of an atmosphere of almost playful innocence.

  The music seemed to come from inside the drawing room. As she stood there, she saw a soft rectangle of light falling across the floor, containing an indefinite silhouette—one of a man. As she moved toward the doorway, the light fell away, and, as she entered the room, the music stopped. She stood there for a moment listening.

  “John?” she whispered.

  But there was no answer.

  She heard the music once more, this time from somewhere else. She went back to the hallway and decided the music was coming from the library. The door was shut but there seemed to be a light shining under it, broken by the movement of a shadow from inside. She hastened to the door and hurled it open. The music momentarily became a bit louder, then stopped. The room was dark and deserted.

  “John?” she whispered again.

  And again, there was no answer.

  As Charlotte moved into the deeper shadows at the rear of the hallway, there seemed to be ominous shadows everywhere. She thought she saw the severed hand there on top of another packing box, or was it another glove? Was that a severed head there in the shadows, or was it just a hat? Beckoned by the music and the moving shadows while calling out John’s name intermittently, she moved from room to room. Was she merely doped into a state of delusion or was she really mad?

  In a small sun room, Charlotte found her carved box standing in a flood of moonlight on the table. And at last she found the source of the music. Or had she? She was hesitant as she approached the box and touched its lid.

  She stood there for a long while, the music tinkling improbably from the closed box, and then with a sudden resolution, she hurled back the lid. There was only the scene painted inside with flowers and birds. The music, maddeningly, stopped. A shadow moved quietly behind her as she whirled around. The doorway behind her stood black and vacant. She stood now shivering with fright, not certain of what she was really afraid.

  At last she moved forward determined to return to the protection of her room, but vacant, silent darkness loomed before her as she started toward the stairs.

  Upstairs Miriam returned to bed, never looking toward the table or noticing the gun was missing. She lay down and closed her eyes.

  Below, Charlotte had reached the foot of the stairs when she heard the music once more, very, very softly from somewhere behind her. She turned. The light now seemed to come from beneath the ballroom doors, and there were broken, darting shadows to suggest people silently dancing inside. Blinking hard, she tried to clear her mind and perhaps her sight
as well as she was irresistibly drawn back in that direction.

  At the door she stopped in the grip of some faintly realized warning. Then she heard a voice very faintly whispering her name… “Charlotte.” She put out her hand to the door, turned the latch and opened it. As before, moonlight flooded the room, reflecting from the glittering remains of the mirrors as the open French window welcomed the balmy summer night.

  “John,” Charlotte whispered, a bit more loudly than before and in answer the music swelled. For a moment Charlotte stood there caught up in the beauty of the moment, growing younger, younger, and hearing the far off laughter of her coming-out ball, remembering…

  Slowly, she began to sway to the music, first this way and that, smiling softly. And then she held out her hands as if to a favored partner, and with the gun dangling incongruously from her hand, she began to dance. She was very graceful and very young, and as the music swelled about her, her smile of pleasure widened and her eyes grew bright.

  As she whirled around the ballroom floor, she saw other ghost figures dancing about her. Suddenly the mirrors became whole again, and the room bright and real, just as it was when she had her first ball there.

  There was laughter and joy and the fulsome music of the orchestra. But as she dipped and glided the room dimmed and returned to moonlight, the mirrors returned to shattered fragments, and the music faded to the thin tinkling sound of the music box.

  Then Charlotte caught a glimpse of someone… or what appeared to be someone… standing in one of the open French windows. Charlotte stopped dancing but still with a small laugh of gaiety and greeting—but the laugh broke off and her face grew stiff with horror. She found herself facing, not the French windows, but one of the shattered mirrored panels. But unmistakably outlined in its interrupted surface was the figure of a man—a headless figure. As Charlotte stood transfixed with horror, the figure raised its arms to her, as if in invitation to the now broken dance, and she saw that he had no hands. Charlotte screamed and her scream echoed into the night. The figure moved toward her and out of the moonlight. In automatic defense, Charlotte grasped the gun with both hands and pointed it in the direction of the approaching figure. With a sob, she fired.