Stranger At Home

by George Sanders

  Neither does Bill. Anyhow, Vickers never came back. Job says he’s dead. Bill says Nuts, the son of a bitch is too ornery to die that easy, and besides we didn’t find a body, did we? No corpus, no delicti. Me, I’ll string with Job. There are sharks in these waters. You don’t have to find a body. And who wants to find Vick’s anyway? Just think, dear diary – this here leaves Angie a widow!

  Vickers noticed, quite casually, that his hands were shaking. He was dimly aware that someone had sat down quietly beside him. He should have been startled when Joe Trehearne’s voice said, “Are you finding some good books?” He was not startled. He was somehow not even surprised. He did not bother to close the log book.

  He looked at Trehearne and smiled. “Are you following me?”

  Trehearne seemed mildly hurt. “Of course not. I can read, you know. I often go into libraries.”

  “Aren’t you a little off your beat?”

  ‘I’m also off duty, and there’s no law yet against a citizen of Los Angeles entering the township of Beverly Hills.”

  “What a pity.” Vickers got up. He closed the log book and held it out to Trehearne. “Would you care to take this along and read it?”

  Trehearne said, “You’re just loaning it to me because you love me.”

  “Quite.”

  “Would you mind stepping over here?” Trehearne indicated the librarian’s desk. They had already attracted her unfavorable attention by raising their voices above a whisper. Vickers shrugged and walked toward her with Trehearne. She watched their approach with marked dislike.

  Trehearne stopped and leaned his elbow on the desk. “You’re sure you want to loan me the book, Mr. Vickers?”

  “Why not?”

  He held it out. Trehearne took it. He said, “Thanks very much, Mr. Vickers. I’ll take good care of it.”

  ‘I’m sure you will, Mr. Trehearne.”

  Trehearne started off. The librarian said sharply, “Here! Just a minute.”

  Trehearne stopped. He gazed at the librarian as one does at a rude child. Then the light broke. “Oh!” he said, holding up the book. “You thought the...” He laughed. “No, no. It’s Mr. Vickers’ personal book. Here, I’ll show you.” He opened the cover to show her the flyleaf.

  She took one good look. Things happened to her face. Trehearne received a premonition that all was not well. He turned the book around and had a look himself. The mermaids frisked merrily around the page, their marvelous anatomies betraying a distressing lack of inhibition. Trehearne looked back at the librarian. He turned scarlet. The librarian leaned forward.

  “Get that filthy thing out of here,” she said, “before I call a policeman.”

  Trehearne fled.

  Vickers raised his head in the cathedral hush and roared with laughter.

  Later, in the cab that was taking him home, Vickers took out the envelope he had found with the log book.

  There was nothing in it but a lock of soft black hair.

  He held it in his fingers, and sat looking at it. He was dimly aware that the cab had turned and begun to climb the hill. He was dimly aware that it slowed and shifted into second at the place where the road twisted and became even more steep. He heard nothing but the complaining snarl of the motor until something snapped past his head, close. Very close. Little stinging flies attacked his cheek. He saw a neat round hole in the window beside him, and as he went down quickly onto the floor he saw that there was another hole, less neat, in the rear window. He put up his hand to his face and pulled out a tiny sliver of glass. There was a little blood and he got out his handkerchief. The cabby drove on. He was thinking about hamburgers and cold beer, and the cute redhead who served them, and wishing he didn’t have a wife and two kids.

  He ground the cab to a stop in front of the house on top of the hill and said, “That’ll be a dollar and thirty cents.”

  Chapter Seven

  Coolin the hound lay on the rug beside Vickers’ bed. He did not sleep. His eyes were deep-sunken and watchful under the rough gray ridges of his brows. His ears moved, delicately, testing the meaning of each sound. Once or twice he raised his head, but he knew that there was no need to rise.

  His master slept, and dreamed.

  The long windows were open. The night was cool. It had fog in it, and the damp bitter-sweet smell of the garden, and it was quiet. Michael Vickers lay on his hard clean bed that had no pillows.

  His eyes were closed, but he could see the room. It was tall like the nave of a church, and dim, and wonderfully still. He could feel the coolness and smell the freshness of evergreens on the air. This is my place, he thought. I am safe here. The sheets of his bed were crisp and had a white feel against his body.

  He pushed them back and rose.

  The high room stretched before him. He walked slowly down the middle of it, and the moist air pressed against him. It was almost as heavy as water. He looked down and saw that it covered him like water, so that he could see only a warped and veiled reflection of his body. He was glad of the veil. He did not want to see himself. He ran his hands over his flesh. It was well-fed and strong, shaped into smooth beauty. He could feel it, and he thought, This is good. But he did not want to see. He walked on, gliding through the thick blue air. There was a window, tall like the window of a church. White curtains fluttered from it. There was no glass in the window, and beyond it there was darkness. Vickers knew that he must go to the window. There was something outside that he must look at. He stopped. If I go, he thought, I shall be destroyed. I will not go.

  The window came to him. It moved quite easily, and it did not seem to be angry, only inevitable, like the next tick of a clock. He put his hands on the broad sill and looked out.

  There was a street. It was narrow and crooked. It had no lights and no paving. There were little mud-walled houses. There was garbage and the odor of it, heavy and rank, and filth, and a dead rat lying in the dust, and a subtle breath of heat. Vickers drew back. He was afraid. He willed his feet to move, to go away, but the floor slid under them like a running stream. He cried out, loud enough for God to hear, and all that came from his mouth was a whisper: Angie! Angie!

  There was someone behind him, and he knew that there was no escape.

  From a great distance a voice said, Turn around, Vickers. Turn around, Vickers. It came closer. Turn around Vickers Turn around Vickers Turn around Vickers. He turned. His lovely room was gone and there was only darkness as unstable as a cloud blown by the wind. There was someone hidden in it. He smelled of hate. That was all that betrayed him, the voice and the dark red smell of hate. Vickers waited.

  The blow fell.

  The window cracked and fell in tinted shards of sound. The darkness rolled away like thunder. A huge brazen sun clanged like a bell-clapper against a sky of sheet copper. Vickers’ head was on fire. He could feel the flames rise and shoot out through the crevice in his skull. His throat was filled with hot sand. It ran out of his mouth and trickled down his chest. He watched it. He could see his body now. It was gaunt and pinch-bellied, and there were marks on it. The long ribbon-shaped weals of the belt. The red-tinged blossoms of the fist. The spreading mark of the boot, like spilled ink. He thought, That’s what I didn’t want to see. He dropped onto his hands and knees.

  Voices yelled at him. They yelled in Spanish and Portuguese and Dutch and German, but they all said Work! Faces swept past him, faces he knew but was too tired to name. Dark faces, oiled with sweat, cursing him. There was just one face that held steady. It was behind them, a long way off, and he couldn’t see it clearly, but he knew that it was a good face and that it would help him and that he wanted it very much. He began to crawl toward it.

  People beat and kicked and shouted at him. Green hides as stiff as iron were in his way, and torrents of coffee beans and mountains of burlap, and the choking stink of tanneries and guano and dirt and hot bilges and blood. The sun wrung him out and dropped him, so that he crept on his belly, but the face he wanted was still there, steady in the d
istance.

  He couldn’t seem to get any closer to it, but it grew clearer as the other things faded away. It was a woman’s face, framed in soft black hair, and it had eyes as golden as wine. He dragged himself on, and suddenly it was cold, very cold, and he was creeping along the floor of a room that was high and beautiful like a cathedral nave. White curtains fluttered from long windows. Ahead there was a bed, narrow and hard and without pillows. A man lay naked upon it as on a catafalque, his eyes closed, his arms crossed over his breast. The face was still there, beyond the bed, high against the wall, and it was only a painted picture.

  The broken, shivering thing that crawled on the floor cried out to the man on the bed. Take me back. I am lost. I’m afraid.

  And the man on the bed answered slowly, moving only his mouth: I am dead.

  Michael Vickers cried out. He could hear it as he woke, a cry of sheer, simple terror. He sat up, snapping on the bedside lamp. He was dripping with cold sweat and his head was aching again. Coolin put his chin on Vickers’ thigh. Vickers took hold of the dog and sat perfectly still until he had stopped shivering. Then he got up, slowly and stiffly because of the pain in his head, which was much worse when he moved. He lighted a cigarette, and stood looking around the room. The curtains moved lightly in the breeze. He picked up his dressing gown and went out into the hall, where he put it on. He had forgotten his slippers. He did not go back for them.

  He went down the hall and rapped on Angie’s door.

  She answered, and he went in. The lamp was burning on the bedside table. There was a book, open and face down on the blanket, but he knew that she had not been reading. She sat quietly against the piled-up pillows and watched him. When the light struck his face she leaned forward and said: “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve got a blinding head.”

  He said it almost angrily. She pushed the book off onto the floor and moved her legs under the fluffy white blanket. For a moment he stood still. Then he went and sat down on the bed, where she had made a place for him. She touched his hand, gently, and frowned.

  “Why, Vick – you’re trembling.”

  “The damn thing hurts, that’s all.” He shrugged it off.

  She looked at his eyes and the line of sweat on his forehead, but she didn’t say anything. She slid the top pillow off and moved over. Presently he stretched out on top of the blanket, and she saw his bare feet.

  “You shouldn’t be running around without your slippers. You could catch cold, or step on a pin, or something.” She reached down and pulled the spare blanket up over his legs. Vickers laughed.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  “It’s funny, that’s all.”

  “What’s funny?”

  “After living the way I have for four years, it’s amusing to have someone fuss over my bare feet.”

  “It’s nice, though, isn’t it?”

  The crawling thing on the floor cried Take me back, I am lost, and the man on the bed answered slowly, I am dead...

  The world turned over.

  From a great distance a voice spoke his name. “Vick.” And then, softly, “Pappy.”

  He was deathly cold, and the saliva ran in his mouth. He said, “What?”

  “My wrist, darling.”

  “What about your wrist?”

  “Nothing, only it’s going to break in a minute.”

  A hand appeared before him. It was his own, and it was gripping Angie’s forearm in the way the hand of a drowning man grips the proverbial straw. He opened his fingers, and left the marks of them livid on her flesh.

  He started to sit up. There was a crack in his skull as big as the Grand Canyon. “I have a grim feeling I’m going to cat.”

  “Don’t be silly. You didn’t eat any dinner.” She pressed him back. He realized that she was out beside him now, with just the spare blanket over both of them. Her arms went around him. He could remember his mother holding him in just that way. Her body was wonderfully warm, wonderfully safe and comforting. The nausea passed. She reached up and touched his hair in the light remembered way, and then her lips brushed the ugly scar.

  “Your poor little noggin,” she whispered. “You must see a doctor about it.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Is it very strange coming back?” She laughed, not very humorously, and amended, “Well, considering what’s happened, I guess it would be for anybody. But you know what I mean. The house, the people, the city, all of it. Being Michael Vickers again.”

  Involuntarily his arms tightened around her. “Yes. Very strange.”

  “You must have suffered terribly.”

  “No more than the rest of them.”

  “Fiddlesticks. They were used to it. You weren’t.”

  “They got just as hungry as I did. And I had the edge on them for size. I found that out on the coffee docks. I could sack and load rings around them.”

  “Don’t try to be noble, Pappy. You’d never missed a meal – and good meals, too – nor done a day’s physical work in your life. Don’t tell me it was easy.” She paused, then added softly, “And don’t tell me you weren’t having nightmares about it just before you came in here.”

  He did not answer. She looked down at his face and saw the change come over it. His eyes were closed, but she didn’t need to see into them.

  “Was it Harry Bryce?” she asked sadly. “Did you recognize his voice and...” She did not finish.

  Vickers said, “No. I didn’t even see Harry.”

  “But if you had...”

  “I couldn’t have recognized his voice. I told you it didn’t sound human. I was crazy with dope. And anyway – not murder. It’s too dangerous, too stupid, and – too quick.”

  He felt her shiver. There was a long silence.

  “Vick.”

  “Yes?”

  “I told you the truth about Harry.”

  “He had a lock of your hair.”

  “Why not, if he wanted it? He got it from my hairdresser.”

  Again there was a long pause. Vickers’ head was beginning to ease off. He was warm again. The dream was retreating into the mental cave where it lived. He knew it was there. But when it was decently veiled, the sharp destroying edges of it hidden, he could study it objectively. He could say to himself quite reasonably, I feel like that because, and go on with the nice neat rationalization. It was only when the bloody thing attacked him in his primitive emotions that it got the better of him.

  He put his hand sleepily on Angie’s head, drawing it closer into his neck.

  “You said you’d been trying to find out what really happened to me. Any results?”

  “Nothing. Except in a negative way. I’m sure Harry Bryce didn’t do it.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “Yes. Harry’s pretty well gone to pieces in the last year or so. You can’t live at Harry’s rate of speed forever. I’ve made him tell me about the cruise, and your disappearance, over and over when he was far too drunk to have any control over what he said. And he always told the same story. Not in the same words, or the same sequence – sometimes just fragments of it – but he never varied the facts.”

  Vickers thought that over and said, “Mm-hm. And the others?”

  “I don’t know. Surely not Job... He’s really a very sweet person, worships his youngsters, puts up with Harriet on account of them. He drinks too much, but with Harriet around, who wouldn’t? And Bill...” She shook her head. “Oh, it’s crazy to think either one of them would do such a thing! People we’ve known so long.”

  Vickers said, “That’s naive, darling. You will never know how naive.” He was drowsy now, delightfully relaxed. He turned slightly, toward Angie, drawing closer to her warmth. “You know, I could see you long before I could remember anything else. I knew your name. Angie. Later on, when my memory was beginning to function by fits and starts, I’d try to think, How did she feel about this thing, or what would she have done about that? And d’you know, Angie, I...”

&
nbsp; “I know,” she finished for him. “You couldn’t remember, because you never bothered to find out.”

  “I found out a couple of things, though. I spent a lot of time thinking down there. I’m an egotistical son of a bee. Some of my thoughts didn’t please me at all, but I couldn’t seem to duck them. And I tried, believe me!” He paused. “I notice the rug is gone. The one before the fireplace.”

  “Yes.”

  “One of the things I learned down there was what it feels like to be mastered, physically.”

  She whispered, “You weren’t very nice to me, Vick.” She drew her breath in, started to shape words with it, then changed her mind.

  “What were you going to say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What was it?”

  “Never mind, Vick. I learned a long time ago, it’s the moment that counts with you, not the days. I’m happy right now. Why spoil it?”

  “Good God, but we’re philosophical!” He sighed and went to sleep.

  He woke very early. Angie was still close to him. Worn out, she had fallen into a heavy slumber, and hardly stirred when he moved away from her and got up.

  He stood looking down at her, his face strangely remote and sad. Then he went out, very quietly, and closed the door behind him.

  Chapter Eight

  Downstairs in the breakfast room Joan Merrill was having her early cup of coffee and her newspaper. Her ritual never varied. Promptly on the stroke of six she arose, splashed cold water on her face, combed her hair, put on her dressing gown and went down to the kitchen, where she brewed her own particularly black and muscular fluid with no help from Cook, who was still abed like a decent body.

  While the pot was dripping, Joan went out and collected the morning paper. Both family and servants had learned to avoid Joan until she had finished with it. By that time the duties of the day had usually put an end to her fulminations against the administration, local politics, national politics, the actions of labor unions, foreign policy, and the sinister behavior of Soviet Russia. Joan thoroughly disapproved of humanity and held little or no hope for it.