Skeleton Key

by Lenore Glen Offord

  Georgine shivered, congratulated herself on having prudently brought along a topcoat, and returned to work. She began to separate the typed sheets which she had flung aside as fast as they were finished. Ribbon copy, carbon, onionskin; ribbon copy—She stopped, appalled.

  At least half of the second and third sheets were blank. She had been putting on too much pressure, and in her haste had turned the carbon paper backward.

  There was only one thing to do about this. Georgine burst into tears, put her head down on her arms and howled heartily for three minutes. Then, much refreshed, she dried her eyes and powdered her nose and started to type the pages all over again.

  But it meant she’d have to work tonight; she was still behind schedule, and this horrible mishap, unless repaired at once, would make it impossible for her to finish within the ten days she’d allotted. “Oh, dear!” Georgine groaned, now typing with exaggerated care. “If I make any more mistakes, I’m sunk.”

  She frowned in annoyance as a velvety voice sounded from below. “Mis’ Wyeth! The P’fessah says could you step down to the lab’atory a minute, please?”

  The laboratory? She’d never been allowed near it before, nor indeed into the basement story of the Professor’s house. She found herself not unwilling to see it; she ran lightly down the stairs. Mrs. Blake had directed her to the door at the east end of the basement corridor, but there were two doors. Georgine tried one of them. No, this wasn’t right; this was the garage, housing a well-preserved coupé of pre-depression vintage, also a remarkable collection of junk. The drive for “skwap wubbah” could not have penetrated this far, for Georgine saw lengths of hose, old gloves and at least three worn-out tires. Even the wedges that held the inner doors open were covered with rubber, so they would hold on the cement floor of the passage. Georgine grinned to herself, with a mental picture of the Professor’s response to scrap collectors. If he had been approached by the little tike about two feet high, the luckless infant was probably still running.

  She tapped at the door which was set at right angles to the inner entrance of the garage. “Come in,” said the abrupt voice of Alexis Paev.

  Georgine saw, with an absurdly let-down feeling, that the laboratory was very dull-looking. There were jars of colorless liquid on glass-enclosed shelves, but they were neither bubbling nor sending off mephitic vapors. The rest of the furniture consisted of a long sink and a discolored table with a few racks of ordinary test-tubes; a stool; an empty wire cage.

  The only picturesque detail was the remote humming sound that pervaded the air. Georgine glanced about quickly, hoping against hope to find a sinister source for this. There was nothing but a set of four small slatted openings, slightly protruding from the wall in which the door was set. They were high up, near the ceiling. Those couldn’t be a Death Ray; they’d been built into the house.

  “Mrs. Wyeth,” said the Professor, swinging round, “will you take down and type a list of figures for me, at once? I must have a statement of expenses, at least an approximate one.” His black eyes burned. He looked more human than she’d ever seen him. “It’s come, after all these years. I knew they’d see the light if I could hold out long enough.”

  “Good news?” Georgine was infected by his excitement.

  The Professor laughed aloud. “I resigned from the University, several years ago,” he said triumphantly, “because the Regents refused to give me proper endowment. Those blind idiots, they couldn’t see how unimportant their little departments of arts and languages were beside a discovery like this! And now, after I’ve worked alone for six years, now that my research is all but finished, they want a share of the credit! I hold no grudges,” said the Professor with a malicious grin that belied his words, “but if they want me back they’ll pay. I’ll pour it to ’em!” He looked at his watch. “Quick, Mrs. Wyeth, type up this list. I’m to be at the Regent’s house in San Francisco at nine-thirty, and I must get down town and buy myself some new shoes and a tie, and have this suit pressed.”

  Georgine took the list of figures, but hesitated. “I’d meant to stay and work this evening, Professor Paev. Will Mrs. Blake leave at the same time as you?”

  “She’ll fix your dinner,” the Professor barked. “Women —always preoccupied with food…” He snatched a handkerchief from his pocket, surveyed its ragged edges and cast it from him. “What’s that? Nervous? Nonsense. You couldn’t be safer, with neighbors only fifty feet away. Lock all the doors. I want ’em locked anyway. Will you finish that list, please?” He looked fiercely into space, muttering, “I’d best not try to drive. Car might break down. If you please, Mrs. Wyeth!” Georgine departed summarily.

  “Will you shut off the air-conditioning?” he shouted after her. “There, behind the door, right outside!”

  She tightened her lips in annoyance, and peered about the corridor wall until she found a plate embossed Nuaire. As the switch flipped over, the mysterious humming noise died away. “No romance left,” she told herself sadly.

  Of course the Professor was right about her having small reason to be nervous; nevertheless—Indeed I’ll lock all the doors, thought Georgine, typing away at the astronomical figures of the Professor’s estimate. You bet I will lock myself in. I won’t bother Harry Gillespie again—a taxi wouldn’t cost too much just for once.

  For some reason she was reluctant to let the neighbors know that she was once more staying away from home this evening. If that tenuous suspicion of hers had any foundation, someone had too much interest in her and her household. She would feel safe here just so long as she was supposed to be somewhere else.

  Therefore Georgine, going downstairs with the typed list and watching the Professor leap with flying coat-tails into a cab, stood well away from the door. Mrs. Blake always kept her own counsel with the other residents of the Road. Georgine saw her go off, too, at her usual time.

  When the wind dropped, she imagined she could still hear the reedy, lonely strain of the mouth-organ from the house up the hill. Or was it in her own head? A tune like that got in your mind and wouldn’t leave you.

  Georgine ate the excellent cold supper which Mrs. Blake had left for her, and hastily washed the dishes. It was still light in the kitchen, with the pearly cold light of late sun. If she hurried, she might just get home before dark.

  In the drearily furnished room upstairs, where she worked, Georgine glanced out the window for a moment before drawing the blind and turning on the desk lamp. “Fog comes on little cat feet” indeed. No cat ever galloped as fast as this was going: against the shaking plumes of eucalyptus at the canyon’s head, the fog streamed gustily.

  She had finished her typing and was painstakingly checking over each sheet, making small pencil corrections, when the last of the homecoming sounds died away in the Road. This was the roll of Roy Hollister’s garage door; funny how soon one learned to recognize those noises, to gauge their distance; the door seemed to echo more flatly tonight, the thick mist distorted its vibrations.

  And now it was quiet, except for the muted roar of traffic rumbling from the city far below. The sun appeared for five minutes under the high fog, and then was sucked down behind the hills of Marin County, and into the sea.

  She hadn’t been quick enough. Now she could not get home before dark.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Blacked Out Forever

  DARKNESS FELL OVER the Bay cities, and lights pricked out in house after house, flowered in great bursts at the shipyards, and made glowing ribbons of the main streets. But into the lonely canyons, across the great stretches of ranch land in the middle valley of California, darkness came unchallenged except by a few misted stars, and here and there a farmhouse whose windows shone a feeble yellow.

  Eighty miles to the northeast a little shack stood by itself on a knoll, miles from a habitation. A car was parked outside it, and not far away a long line of telephone poles marched, swinging their taut garlands of wire.

  There were two men in the shack. Through the door that stood open
to the summer night they could be seen bending attentively over a checkerboard. The light of a coal-oil lamp fell on them and struck out a luminous rectangle across the threshold. A dog lay beside one of the chairs, motionless, his head on his master’s foot.

  One of the men, lifting a checker for a move, paused with his hand in mid-air. He raised his eyes, listening, and the dog stirred. “Huh,” the man said, smiling, “darned if my ears don’t prick up just like Spot’s, here.”

  “That’s one,” the other man said elliptically, nodding. He went outside, lifting his face to the night sky. A high long drone drifted down to his ears. “North,” he said. “Headed southwest, I think.”

  His companion was bending over a telephone instrument. “Army flash,” he said, and waited. Voices crackled in the receiver; presently, at a signal, he began unhurriedly, “Flash one, single, high, heard…”

  “Hell,” he said disgustedly, hanging up the receiver. “I jumped up so sudden I joggled the men out of place.”

  “Lucky they don’t pay us for this job,” the other man said. “If they did, we couldn’t afford to do it.”

  They laughed as if at a well-worn joke, and replaced the checkers.

  Twenty-five miles away a middle-aged couple paced nervously up and down outside a private garage on a hilltop. The woman said plaintively, “It’s dark as pitch. I don’t know how they expect us to see anything.”

  “We don’t have to, Mother,” the man said. “Now, just keep calm, you seemed to do all right when they were training us. This is the only way we can do our—Listen!”

  “Go on,” the woman said dubiously. “We’ve been caught that way before. It’s the Sikes boy’s motorcycle.”

  “I guess you’re right.” He cupped his hand behind his ear. “Yeah, there it goes up the hill—Say, I’m not so sure. Sounds awful high to me.”

  “You want to put it in?” His wife was still doubtful. “But what if it is the Sikes—”

  “Can’t do any harm. I bet there’s plenty of us’ve reported motorcycles and such. They’d rather have a false alarm than miss a real one.”

  “Oh, all right. You do it. I’m never sure.”

  “No, Mother. You’ve got to phone sometimes.”

  The woman turned reluctantly into the garage. “Ar—army flash,” she quavered into the telephone, and had to clear her throat several times before she could answer the crisp voice that said, “Army; go ahead, please.”

  “Unknown,” the woman said, hoarsely, “unknown, and we just heard it, we can’t see a thing; unkno—What’s that? Oh, yes, the code number, wait a minute.” She scrabbled among papers. “Victory forty-three. Direction unknown, distance unknown, we can’t see where it’s going.”

  “Thank you,” said the crisp voice.

  The woman drew a deep breath. “That’s that,” she said. “I don’t see how it helps ’em much.”

  It seemed to make no difference to the score of women who sat about a huge table map. They spoke into their headset telephones, they reached out sure hands to lay small markers on the map, to set up odd little racks bearing slips of card. The checker-playing men had inspired the placing of one of those direction arrows, the nervous couple another; another came, and two more, and another, now only a few minutes apart.

  There were more telephones on the glass-enclosed balcony above, where other women sat; and still more in the distant center to which they were reporting. Looking up from the floor of this second map room, you saw men in uniform and men in civilian clothing. You saw their lips move before the instruments, and their hands stretch out to make notations, to press buttons on the board before them. You saw several of them exchange glances, speak to each other, return to the telephones.

  It looked very simple and leisurely; yet, within ninety seconds of the last report there had been a careful check and re-check, and a certain order had been given, and a civilian official had been interrupted while listening to his favorite radio program.

  Within the space of a few more seconds the radio fell silent. The marking arrows on the huge map were pointing directly at San Francisco Bay.

  Georgine Wyeth waited, none too patiently, in the one lighted room of Professor Paev’s house, the southern workroom whose window looked over the canyon. The harried woman at the taxicab company had promised her that a cab would pick her up sometime. “It will be subject to delay,” she had said. How much delay, for heaven’s sake, Georgine wondered. It was a full hour since she had finished work and put in the order. It would serve the cab company right if she started out walking, and let the driver find an empty house when he came—if ever he came.

  They had the drop on her, though. She was frankly unwilling to go walking through these deserted hill streets alone, and doubtless the cabman knew it.

  She looked through her perfectly typed pages once more, and stacked them neatly, and decided to allow herself a cigarette. She had found the matches, and was about to strike one, when a far-off wailing sound struck.

  Georgine’s hands had begun to shake, and she put down cigarette and match quickly. “That’s it,” she said aloud in the empty room. “That’s it…”

  There was something in that endless wail that went, deeper than the ears, past the conscious mind, into a part of one that was pure instinct. It had been like that at the very beginning of the war, long before the sound became familiar. Blackout—alert—this is it.

  What had Hollister said? “The next one may be real.”

  She flicked the switch of the desk lamp and felt her way to the window. If the sash were opened, it was supposed to minimize the danger of shattering glass. But, she thought suddenly, she needn’t stay in this room; the Professor’s refuge room was the downstairs hall, and those two small windows by its door had been permanently blacked out. Mrs. Blake had said that in case of a bombing, all those present in the house could crowd into the closet under the stairs. Georgine had had a vivid picture of herself, the Professor and the African Queen, all mashed together in the dark, and had quaked with inner laughter. She wasn’t laughing now.

  She might have thought of this; but there hadn’t been a blackout for months, you forgot between times… The next one will be the real thing. “Barby,” Georgine said, her lips barely moving. “Oh, God, I can’t die while she’s so little.” Oh, come, be sensible, who’s going to die?

  The fog over the cities had stayed faintly luminous for a few minutes; now that white glow had died slowly, and it seemed that everything else had died with it as the roar of trains and traffic slackened and disappeared. Georgine had never before been in the very heart of silence, as she was now, alone in this black house.

  She felt her way along the corridor wall to the upstairs window. In the stillness she could hear, very high and far away, a faint droning sound, and found herself peering upward desperately as if her eyes could pierce roof and fog and miles of night air. Then that sound was covered by a nearer, homelier one; Roy Hollister’s front door opened, and his feet clacked briskly along the cement walk.

  Almost at once there was a noise as if of stumbling, and the warden said “Damn!” loudly and heartily. Georgine ceased to shake, and found herself silently laughing. He must have tripped over one of the uneven places in the road’s paving, where it had buckled badly in the summer heat. The footsteps were muffled now, and she guessed that he had taken to the edge of pavement for safety. The tiny blob of light from his dimmed electric torch was visible in this blackness, as it would never have been in an ordinary half-luminous night.

  There was another minute glow, somewhere across the street; Georgine, straining her eyes, could almost make out numbers in its shape. Dear me, she thought, again grinning; the Carmichael sisters didn’t turn off their street-number light after all, and won’t Hollister be furious! He hadn’t seen it yet, for the Carmichael house was below his and faced southwest; and he had started methodically uphill toward the Devlins’.

  Georgine’s conscience smote her suddenly. People didn’t do much to coöperate w
ith the poor man. She might as well obey orders and seek the refuge room.

  She got down the stairs deliberately, one at a time, and felt her way round the walls of the entry. Wooden panels, a space with woolly materials hanging: the coat closet, left open…more paneling, then rough paper over the windows that flanked the door; wood panels…the staircase.

  She went round once more. It was no use; she couldn’t find the light switch. “Don’t sit in the dark,” the authorities had counseled, “it’s bad for morale.” They didn’t know the half of it, Georgine thought, clenching her teeth to keep them from chattering. She could feel morale draining out through the soles of her feet.

  There was no use in imagining the things that might be coming at her out of the dark house. She sat down on the bottom stair, hoping violently that the blackout wouldn’t last long. What time was it? Seemed as if she’d heard the Campanile strike ten, just before the siren went off.

  There came the warden’s footsteps, down the road, pad, pad, pad, very stalwart and reassuring. There was no other sound. Georgine knew just when he stopped at the sight of the flagrantly illuminated number. The timbre of the steps changed; he was going in the Carmichaels’ gate, past their thick hedge, and a faint clanking bore witness to his attack on the metal holder of the number.

  After several minutes the steps were retraced. They grew more audible, but slower, as he prepared to cross the street, angling down toward the Paev house. They had a cautious sound now, as if Hollister were feeling his way across the rough pavement.

  Then the noise came.

  It was only a rush and a rattle at first; then, before the ear could define it, a dull crashing impact followed the first sound; and then, with a terrifying bang in which wood seemed to be splintering, the noise rose to a crescendo of shrieking metal: crash, bump, crash, into the ravine.

  Georgine found herself by the front door, her hand closed round the knob, her whole body clammy with terror. It must have been a bomb, the first of those bombs that had been expected for months. There had been no explosion, but maybe this was a different kind…