The wind . . . in slowtime,
Yet there were gusts on occasion, and a few that were quite strong, though they seemed less demonstrations of strength than measures of desperation. Gusts that chased a huddled white cat from beneath a dripping hedgerow, tested panes and twigs and found shallow voice in the throat of a black alley. A battered paper cup rimmed brown with dried coffee was tripped off a curb on Centre Street and nudged fitfully along the lane of a gutter through damp islands of mud and debris unidentified and shimmering in the frayed glare of a streetlamp; nudged and herded to the bars of a corner storm drain where it caught, balanced, blew briefly into the street before being recaptured and returned with a vengeance; returned and held, tipped . . . and gone.
Sam watched the greywhite container flash brightly before vanishing. Then she wrenched away suddenly and hunched her shoulders against the wind. Waited. Muttered. Heard from a nearby home whose radio was too loud the falsely idyllic strains of a slowtime “South of the Border.” A window abruptly slammed shut; the music sliced to silence. It would be just her luck, she thought sourly, that a war would start tonight and she would not know it.
She waited.
The wind gusted.
And when the air at last calmed with its mocking reminder of a winter just past, she straightened and frowned, craning her neck as though a cramp had begun. Her left hand touched absently at the pale pink kerchief protecting her short hair, then dropped to adjust the collar on her new spring coat more snugly around her throat. It was fur, and it was damp, and it was beginning to smell.
The frown deepened to a scowl. The soft planes of her face were given harsh edges. and her age increased as her irritation grew.
Above her head, in a grey marble casing with false turrets atop, the bank clock chimed softly, barely warning the night. It was nine. He was late.
She tugged at an earlobe to mark her annoyance, swept an auburn curl away from her right eye. She paced to the corner and made a savage survey of the street before wandering back to the bank and leaning hard against its wall. He was late. If she hadn’t had so much to do at the office, she could have arranged to meet him at home, in comfort. Nevertheless, he was late. But not to worry. Not yet. Not ... yet.
An automobile passed. A coupe. A Pontiac. Tensing slightly, she squinted to find its color, found it wrong and shrugged. Five minutes later a touring car swept by. She ignored it; it was traveling too fast. Her cheeks puffed and she blew a hard breath, and it occurred to her then that a patrol car might pass. She grinned at the thought. Maidens lounging on street corners were not functions of the Station.
And the way things were going she would probably know the patrolman:
-Hey there, Miss England, you waiting for a bus?
-Very funny, Thomas. I’m waiting for Malcolm Marsh, in fact.
-Out here in the rain?
-It isn’t raining, it’s drizzling. Don’t you ever listen to the weather reports?
-Well, look, Miss England, don’t you think ... I mean, don’t you think it might be a better idea if you waited over there in the luncheonette? It’s drier, trust me, and you can see this spot just as well.
-Thomas Hancock. Officer, sir, are you worried about my virtue?
A car’s horn soundly harshly somewhere deeper in the village; it was answered by another, and ringed by faint laughter. She shook her head vigorously to dispel her fancies and glanced up at the clock again. Fifteen past. Not to worry. Especially tonight. Tonight, she had promised herself before leaving the office, she would not be waiting around long enough for worry to take hold. As she had let her coworkers know in no uncertain terms, this was to be his last chance, and it appeared that her suspicions were proving unpleasantly, and disappointingly, correct—that Malcolm Marsh knew far less about her affections and their direction than his ego led him to believe. That she was unmarried, and in her mid-thirties, had evidently gained her unwanted admittance to a club of stereotypes; that she was thin, just on the fine side of gently attractive, and unafraid to unleash her intelligence in the presence of others, made her somewhat of a curiosity, and suspect. At least as far as Malcolm was concerned.
A challenge, then, and Samantha was just perverse enough to give it to him.
As she granted him ten minutes more, to nine twenty-five. He took it without asking, and five minutes besides.
A snub-nosed bus lumbered by, the last connection the Station had with the outside, and she was reminded for no reason at all of the Saturday a number of her friends had chartered one such for a trip down to the Bronx Zoo. It had started as a lark—why should kids have all the fun?—and became a serious tour. They’d felt foolish piling out at the entrance, watching all the gawkers waiting for the children, less so once they’d begun their walking. Vince Bartelle had stayed with her most of the day, commenting often, making Malcolm angry at the outrageous lies he told when the facts eluded him. The only time Vince had quieted stretched across the homes of the big cats and the snakes. He remarked on the difference between the cats eating their food dead while the snakes ate it alive, was fascinated when Malcolm explained that many species of serpent had quite a number of teeth, much more than the two fangs they were usually associated with. At the monkey house Vince sported and Malcolm grunted. She loved the elephants, and Vince regaled her with the exploits of Sabu until Malcolm coldly muttered that Hollywood didn’t know a tusk from a tuba. Vince told him he had no soul, and for the first time Sam wondered just how much Malcolm loved her.
Five minutes.
Great, she thought; this is just great. The biggest movie in the whole damned world finally gets around here and I have to miss it. It wasn’t Gable so much that she minded not seeing, nor the elegant and tragic Leslie Howard, nor the famed, delicious moment of swearing; it was the color. In this new season when all colors were still struggling to be green and there were still too many shades of brown left over from the cold, she wanted the color. So she told herself when she gave him still another five minutes for penance, and one for absolution.
-Hey, Miss England, you going into business for yourself out here?
-Not funny, Tom.
-Sorry, Miss England.
-So am I, Tom. But at least I have company.
She decided then that one of these days she was going to have to let Hancock take her out, just so she wouldn’t have conversations with him on drenched street corners on a Friday night—especially when he wasn’t even there to talk to.
What, she wondered suddenly, is the legal age when one officially becomes a spinster?
She scowled at herself in a warning against self-pity and considered lighting a cigarette. No; L.S.M.F.T., perhaps, but Lucky Strikes were decidedly not the fashion for ladies at night in Oxrun Station. And definitely not out in the open.
A moment later she grinned and shook her head slowly, a gesture of concession: the problem was not Malcolm Marsh, nor her insanity in waiting in the rain like some lovesick schoolgirl. The problem, as it had been for the last two or three weeks, was the house—a parched Cape Cod, comfortably furnished, flanked by dogwood and red maple and ringed by a privet hedge that gave fits to the neighbors’ dogs. A thoroughly pleasant place to live, and she did not want to go home.
Damnit, Malcolm, I was counting on you!
The window down the street opened again and she heard someone’s halting rendition of the new Goodman tune. She hated it. The window closed. She wondered if it was a sign.
She took a deep breath, held it, hoped she would not meet anyone from the office. The people she worked with had not been taken with Malcolm from the first day he’d come in to keep a luncheon date, and even Danny, the odd-jobber, had managed to hint to her that she was wasting her time. It galled her to think that a kid might be right.
She glanced up at the clock; enough was enough.
With hands buried deeply in her coat pockets, head down to avoid the wind and watch for puddles, she walked quickly down Centre Street to Chancellor Avenue and turned right, in
front of the police station. She tried not to think of having just stood the man up—or of having been stood up in turn—or of the house and her unreasonable reluctance to face it. Instead, she concentrated on her summer vacation. A year ago she had promised herself a first-class sleeper to Los Angeles, or perhaps a visit to some old Holyoke friends who had settled in the Pacific Northwest. But at the time there had been, suddenly, too many variables in too many portfolios for her to leave the brokerage house for an extended absence. This year, however, things were going to be different.
Maybe, she thought, he’s been in an accident.
The house ...
There had also been the matter of Vincent Bartelle. He had joined the firm last May at the insistence of her uncle, who was still nominally in charge, though he was and would be until he died confined to his bed and left the daily operations to herself and Reginald Craig. As soon as Vince had seen her he had wanted her, and made no bones about it. Yet there was an Old World courtliness about him that kept her from feeling constantly on the defensive, constantly threatened. So, there had been a dinner. Two. An average of once a month throughout the winter after the excursion to the zoo. Then, last month, he had asked her if she would like an ocean voyage to Southampton. England, that is, he’d said with a poke at her nameplate on her office door. You and me, kiddo, what do you say? She had been so unnerved she’d almost said yes.
Maybe, she thought, he got his signals crossed and he’s waiting at the house.
She crossed the street without looking, and slowed as she reached the newly built hospital. Her gaze touched at each window light and dark, reflex prodding a smile for each couple she passed.
Her third choice was to stay home. To catch up on her reading. To finish that ridiculous rug still half hooked and draped forlornly over the back of a kitchen chair. The garden would want tending. The porch cried for painting, the attic for cleaning . . . Vince, however, would not wait for her answer. Yesterday, he had dropped a grinning hint that he was asking an acquaintance who lived across the state in Hartford. She did not mind, not all that much. Despite the crunch, her savings were more than adequate for the train journey westward. But her nerves were not. She had been too long in the Station, she told herself, far too long in relative isolation, and she was not all sure she could handle the world yet. Small doses first. Harley. Hartford. Boston. New York. By the time she was able to survive a week alone in Manhattan ...
A laugh as small as her smile escaped her. In part it was at her own marvelous performance in rationalization, in part the sight of Malcolm’s bulbous automobile parked at the curb in front of the house, the last on the block just before the deep woods. So he had been confused. How like the man, she thought with a surge of affection that both startled and disturbed her.
She stopped at the passenger door and leaned down. There was no one inside.
On the porch, then. Like an old man he would be in that bentwood rocker he had staked out for his own, his freckled brow familiarly creased in perpetual scowling, right hand imperially on the armrest, left pulling absently at the knot of his tie. Even in a furnace Malcolm would always wear a tie.
She straightened, turned, and would have called out. She shivered instead.
It was the silence that stilled her.
No automobiles passing the corner, no nightbirds or insects, not a single vagrant droplet falling from a leaf.
The last house on the block.
To her right was the village, to the left the woodland that tangled up to the hills surrounding Oxrun on three of its sides. The house opposite had burned down five years before; the very day, she recalled, that the WPA was formed and her uncle had his stroke. The only other house whose residents she knew was directly next door, the Kramers’ small Colonial-and they were down in Virginia visiting their children.
Her hands left their pockets and crossed over her stomach.
The quiet.
Even during the day the birds seemed to avoid her, birds that had once fined the trees to distraction and had made her believe a cat might be a fine and ruthless investment.
When she took a step away from the car, her heel cracked too loudly and she stopped again, waiting.
The quiet.
Her own place. The porch partially screened by evergreen shrubs whose names she despaired of ever remembering, whose branches she was barely able to keep in close check. The amber light over the front door “vas burned out again. The windows were blind. The hedge that marked her front lawn could easily have been stone.
She thought about walking down to the Kramers’ and whistling for their old tom, a one-eyed bloated animal she had promised to keep fed while its owners were away. But the cat had never liked her, and now that she thought about it she hadn’t seen it since last Monday.
Another deep breath, then, and a silent scolding for her fears. A step toward the front walk. The cracking of her heels. Seeing the mud-splattered brown shoe lying on its side just beyond the hedge’s ragged corner.
“Malcolm,” she whispered loudly, ran forward and began to kneel.
The kneeling to a fall.
The fall to a scream.
There was the shoe, and the foot, and nothing else but the blood.
gliding
Voices in a distant corridor intruding upon a dream; respectful, awkward, fluttering into silence when she stirred and tossed her head from side to side on the stiff pillow. She sat up abruptly, one hand automatically gripping the sheet to her chest. The other darted to her lips, which trembled coldly against her fingers. The light was dim, and a figure moved from the shaded comer swiftly, stopping at the wooden footboard and smiling at her warmly.
“Sam,” Vince said, “I thought you were snubbing me.” His accent was Harvard thick, his hair Neapolitan black and luxuriantly thick; a rake is what her uncle had called him, and Vince had laughed at the telling.
Her breathing came in quick shallow gasps, but she managed a smile in return as bravely as she could. An image formed . . . she thrust it back. And as her vision cleared and she glanced toward the window, she realized it was afternoon, not evening: there was harsh sunlight on King Street, and she was back in the hospital, not in her home. The bed had been cranked up to a forty-five degree angle, and when she slumped back to the pillow Vince remained in sight.
“You all right, kiddo?”
She passed a hand wearily over her forehead. “I’m beginning to feel like a character lost in those Gothics Angie reads,” she said.
He shrugged shoulders that were a shadow too broad for the size of his torso, the size of his head. Then he punched impatiently at the unruly dark shock that hung stubbornly over his brow.
“How . . . have you been waiting here long?”
“Just a few minutes,” he said, as though the time didn’t matter. “Nurse Jones, or whatever her name is, said you hadn’t been given anything for sleeping so I thought I might as well stick around for a while. You know how it is.” He moved to sit on the edge of the mattress, her left leg shifting to give him room, the grace that was his hallmark giving her the impression he had hardly moved at all. He took her hand in his, lightly, without possession. “You’ve got us all worried, you know. The paperhanger even stopped threatening us until we knew how you were.”
An image ...
“Lord, do I look that bad?” She had aimed for a jest, knew she had fallen far short.
Vince grinned a denial, “Have the cops been bothering you? The rubber hose, third degree and all that?”
She accepted the diversion gratefully. “Hancock, bless his soul, came in the ... the next day. And the day they brought me back. He’s all right,” she added quickly when Vince scowled. “He knows how hard something like this can be.”
“Craig wants me to be sure, you know.”
“I can take all the time I need,” she said, imagining Reg’s instructions, “Believe me, I know it. And I’ll bet he’s being so terribly efficient that Uncle Leonard is just busting for another stroke, trying
to figure out how he can ease me back into the kitchen without ruining his reputation. Am I right, or am I right?”
He grinned, laughed, the intimacy of coworkers united against an enemy too clumsy and blatant to be even marginally threatening. It was, she understood, part of the curse of her sex: Leonard England owned the firm, and though he had never officially planted a title on either her or Craig, it was she who had taken over as the office’s manager. For anyone else but Craig, however, her position would have been abundantly clear. He would not accept it, unfortunately, or was too dense to see it. A fiction. The others didn’t mind. When trouble arose, they asked Samantha anyway.
“It’s a sad thing to behold, Sam. The place is in a shambles.”
He stared at a point just over her head. “I don’t think poor old Reg realized just how much you knew that wasn’t written down. Like . . . well, young Toal came in day before yesterday, and Reg forgot that the man abhors smoking. After Reg dumped his second cigar, Toal picked up a magazine and cleared the air with it, and walked out without a word. I think Reg was ready to cry.” The grin broadened and he leaned closer. “If you were smart, Sam, you’d get dear Uncle to sign it all over to you now, before Reg ruins us.”
“I can’t,” she said softly. “He’s really rather good.”
“Yeah. I know. And surprising, sometimes.”
She lifted an eyebrow.
“The day you came in, the first time, I suggested we think about taking another trip to the zoo. Great fun, silly as hell, and would you believe he and Danny were on the same side for a change? Boy, did I get lectures about animals in cages!”
Silly, she thought; that’s what Reg needs—to be silly once in a while, He was the only one who hadn’t taken that first trip.
A tall man in white came to the open door. Vince rose immediately and backed away.
“Samantha,” Dave Greshton said. He hurried in with a smile, swiped the sidetable with his hip and had to lunge for the water pitcher before it struck the floor. As it was, his shoes were drenched.
The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant Volume 1: Nightmare Seasons (Necon Classic Horror) Page 2