Listen for the Whisperer

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  I stopped only to call out to Irene that I’d found Laura. Then I went into the dark corridor, groping for her.

  She caught me by the arm at once. “Oh, no, no! Why did you call her? Now she’ll find us all too quickly. Oh, Leigh, now—”

  “But it’s Irene,” I said. “She brought me here to look for you.”

  Laura’s hands were cold on my own. “Of course! She wanted us together. She hates us both. Now I don’t know what she’ll do. It’s Irene I’m afraid of, Leigh. It has always been Irene. There—do you hear her coming?”

  We could both hear her, running on the walks, running about the church. There was no time for reason, for readjustment. I only knew at last, and without doubt where danger lay. Laura huddled close to me and we were very still.

  Irene had paused at one entrance to the passageway. “I know where you are now. I know you’re both in there. Come out at once, or I’m coming in after you.”

  Laura whispered in my ear. “She has a gun. She took it from my room. Cass Alroy’s gun. I missed it two days ago. She’ll have brought it with her.”

  I had to think, to plan—and there was no time. The dark passageway where we crouched had two openings—one on the side of the church near Irene, the other on the opposite side. I began to push Laura toward the free entrance.

  “Get out—run!” I told her. “Get away and find help. I’ll hold her off here. It’s you she’s after.”

  Laura did not argue. She held me in a quick, close embrace, and then ran toward the patch of light around the curving inner wall. I could hear Irene coming in the other way, and I stiffened myself in the darkness for whatever might come. All that was important now was Laura’s escape. If I had to fight Irene, I would.

  There was something peculiarly horrible about that black figure which blocked the light from this end and came inexorably toward me. She was not the woman I knew, but someone other behind a mask. The thought came to me sharply that I might never see Gunnar again.

  Irene’s advance had slowed. I knew she must be blinded, as I had been, and I stood in her path, blocking her from Laura. She ran directly into me, and snatched at my arm with one thin hand.

  “Which one of you is it?” she whispered hoarsely.

  I knew that sound. I had heard that voice in the night commanding me to listen, listen … I froze where I was in utter silence. Something cold and metallic pressed against my temple, spelling death, while her other hand sought my identity, touching my hair, my face, the fabric of my coat.

  “So it’s only Miss Hollins!” the deadly voice whispered. “If you’ve let her get away, you’ll have to pay for it, you know. Come out into the light. Come with me at once!”

  She dragged me by the arm with one hand, while the other held that cold muzzle to my temple. We stumbled together into bright sunlight, and above us the dragons and serpents seemed to hiss in triumph because evil was in command. The inner sanctity of the church could not help me now.

  For an instant Irene took her attention from me and looked about the empty courtyard. Laura must have made her escape. But now the madness in the woman’s eyes grew in intensity. She stepped a little back from me and raised the automatic.

  “Why don’t you try to run?” she said. “Why don’t you try to escape, you stupid child?”

  If I moved to run, she would shoot me down. That was what she was telling me. She had gone beyond sanity. I could only stand where I was and try to delay her pursuit of Laura.

  “Of course I shall pay you both off in the end,” she told me. “Murder must be paid for, punished. And she’s a murderer. She told you the truth last night—that she killed Cass Alroy. There’s blood on her hands, and blood must be paid for with blood.”

  I could hear obsession in her voice. Somehow she had learned what she believed was the truth and over the years that long-ago death had begun to possess and twist her mind, crying out for retribution.

  “There’s no place where she can hide from me,” she went on. “And you’ve been interfering ever since you came. I owe you payment for that. As I owe it to her many times over. I owe it to her for striking me down in the garden the other day. She made me so angry that I might have paid her off then. I had dragged her outside, but behind my back she’d picked up that candlestick near the door, and she struck me down with it. Only she lacked the courage to strike to kill, as she’d done that other time. She held back the force of the blow. And afterwards she was too weak to let me lie there in the rain. There’s no iron in her. She had to rouse the house to search for me and make sure she hadn’t killed me. But the end’s in sight now. And it will begin with you.”

  Her eyes were wild, staring, utterly mad. She was far more dangerous than a sane woman. Then from beyond her I saw with horror that Laura had come around the front of the church. It took all my control to keep from shifting my gaze in her direction. I tried to keep Irene talking, keep her from turning.

  “It was you who scarred the picture, wasn’t it? Not Laura! It was you who marked that game of tic-tac-toe across the canvas, and left that crayon message for me.”

  She no longer had the gun pointed directly at me, since she was quite sure I couldn’t get away, and she was willing to talk—with insane pride.

  “Of course! And put those shears in her hand. That really frightened her, because she knew what might happen when the game ended. Because I was X. Only it would have been simpler, it would have happened sooner, if you hadn’t come. I didn’t want her to marry Dr. Fletcher, but after she did, I had to begin closing in. She was desperately afraid I would tell him the truth about her killing Cass Alroy. She was afraid of losing him if he knew. That was the thing that held her silent about me.”

  “And it was you who damaged her ski, you who pushed me on the stairs?”

  Her smile of triumph answered me. Irene had done it all. She had lied to me at every turn to allay my suspicions, fooled me at will. There was a cunning to madness that I’d never met before.

  My eyes were wide with staring—staring into Irene’s face so they wouldn’t shift to Laura, who was close now—but weaponless, helpless. I blinked and watched that wavering gun.

  “If you harm me, you’re finished,” I told her. “There’ll be no escaping such an act.”

  “Do you think I care? What happens afterwards doesn’t matter—once I can stop the two of you. Oh, at first I thought you’d be useful. It was clear enough that you wanted to pay her off, injure her. Sometimes I almost liked you because I felt you were on my side against her. Sometimes I—”

  Laura’s arm came around Irene’s throat from behind. Its grip choked her momentarily, threw her off balance. I dropped out of range as the gun fired with a roar, spattering stone from the enclosure wall. Laura gripped and clung, and they fell together, rolling on the ground. I stamped on Irene’s hand, and she let the gun go. After that, she needed both hands for the fighting fury of Laura Worth.

  Gunnar and Donia found them there as they came running up the hill, with Miles a little way behind. Gunnar pulled Irene to her feet and she turned her attention to struggling wildly with him. Miles helped Laura up and held her tightly in his arms. She was breathing heavily and her color was high and bright, her eyes shining with the unmistakable light of battle. She had actually enjoyed coming to physical grips with her long-suffered tormentor. She was primitive woman.

  Then Irene broke away from Gunnar and ran from us, out of the enclosure, and away from the church.

  “Let her go,” Miles said. “It doesn’t matter. The police will pick her up. There’s nowhere she can hide.”

  Laura came to me anxiously. “Leigh darling, are you all right?”

  “You shouldn’t have come back,” I said. “She might have killed you. She wanted to kill us both.”

  “Did you think I would run away and leave you to her? Did you think I’d let her harm my daughter? Darling—how little you know about me!”

  Suddenly her arms were around me, and we were both weeping. Her tears mingled
with my own as her cheek pressed against mine. It was a wonderfully unrestrained and emotional moment. Above our heads the serpents hissed in despair—because evil had been vanquished after all.

  Gunnar picked up the gun and gave it to Miles. Laura turned her head and stared at it in Miles’s hands.

  “All these years I’ve kept it,” she said. “Cass brought it with him to the studio that night when he meant to kill me. It’s all as I told you last night, Miles.”

  “I know,” he said. “I understand now. I’m glad I was able to free you from what you’ve believed all these years. But now we must go back to the cottage, and you must rest. There’ll be the police to call—matters to take care of.”

  Gunnar came to put an arm quietly about me, and for the first time I realized I was trembling with the aftermath of shock.

  “You will be all right now, Leigh,” he said. “It is over now. You are both safe.”

  I held on to him. “But why—why? What has made Irene, of all people, hate Laura like this?”

  “I do not know. It is for Laura to tell us. If she wishes.”

  All this while Donia had hovered nearby, taking no part, her eyes dancing with excitement—but now without malice. Gunnar smiled at her.

  “It is a good thing Mrs. Jaffe worried when she saw Leigh driving away with Irene. She phoned me at once. By the time I reached Kalfaret, Miles had returned from Fantoft. He had left Laura in what he supposed was a safe place and come back to the house to let Irene know that she must pack and leave Bergen at once, that she would not be permitted to see Laura again. When Donia informed him that Irene had taken Leigh to Fantoft, we all followed in our cars.”

  Laura listened to his words and her smile was beautiful. “My daughter tried to save me, Gunnar. Leigh tried to hold Irene so I could get away. But we couldn’t leave each other. I could never have run away and left her to Irene. Now I must tell you everything. We will go back to the cottage—and I’ll tell you the story of that night in Hollywood so long ago. I’ll tell you how Irene came to feel so strongly about something which should have had nothing to do with her in the first place.”

  We stopped to telephone on the way. Gunnar alerted the police to look for a woman who was unbalanced and dangerous, and told them we would wait for word at Laura Worth’s cottage.

  In the small house Gunnar lighted the fire and we sat about it, more chilled and shaken than the day warranted. Breaking the stillness that had been laid upon us, Laura’s voice took up a very old story.

  Time seemed to falter, hesitate, stand still—then slowly begin to roll backward to another day, another place. It was as if we were there, as if it was all happening anew.

  Chapter 15

  In California, moonlight lay quiet upon the night. The village of small stucco buildings, the replica of a city street, the false-front western town, the great sound stages, all were still and empty. A few lights burned through the studio grounds, and the guard at the gate stayed inside his shelter, expecting nothing to happen—as it never did.

  True, the director, Mr. Alroy, had checked in tonight. But he had a right to be there, as had Miss Worth, who was staying overnight in her dressing room in Stage 5. That’s where Mr. Alroy was heading—and if something was up between those two, it wasn’t the business of a watchman.

  A sound stage was not a stage, properly speaking. Sound Stage 5 was a converted Quonset hut—a huge building with an exterior painted pastel pink, and an interior as vast as a basketball court. Laura Worth was lost and small inside it, but she did not mind, and she had no fear of the great, echoing barn of a place at night. This was her world, and sometimes when she wanted to be wholly caught up in the mood of a coming scene, she would stay in her dressing room, sleep there, prepare herself for tomorrow’s shooting. After all, there was nothing to pull her back to her home in the Hollywood hills. It was work that was her life, her very breath. She hated all distractions which pressed upon her from outside, or made demands upon her mind and emotions.

  That letter which had come from Victor Hollins yesterday, for instance, had been unhappily distracting. She must forget it now. All that was over, smothered, buried in the past. Yet it was hard to keep it utterly buried while she was working on a Victor Hollins novel. And he had enclosed a picture of the little girl, Leigh. She had asked him not to send pictures, not to write about her—to let all that belong to another life, because these things left her shattered for days at a time. But Victor had written that she could not belong wholly to her present life while Leigh was growing up. Someday she must meet her daughter.

  So the letter had been a distraction, and the shooting had gone badly. It would all have to be done over tomorrow, Cass had said. And that was another thing, though more closely connected with her work. Cass had been absolutely beastly all through the picture. He had raged at her today, taunted her, belittled her reputation and her ability. Some directors could get what they wanted from an actress by such treatment, but she was not one of them. She had turned wooden, and the scene had been impossible to play. It was a scene of key importance, and it had to be right. She knew that Cass had grown to hate her. She had rejected his personal attentions, and this he could not forgive her for. She suspected him of being unbalanced, revengeful to a dangerous degree.

  Today he had wound up by making her physically ill. She had collapsed on the set, and Dr. Fletcher had been sent for. Another distraction. Miles wanted to marry her, and he was far more importunate than Victor had ever been. He would gladly have seen her career come to an end, even though he’d been drawn to her because she was famous and gifted. She was fond of him, but she knew better than to let him come too close.

  When he arrived at the studio that afternoon there had been a thoroughly unpleasant quarrel between him and her director. There was already a deep antagonism between the two men because Cass had been involved in Donia Jaffe’s divorce suit. There had been threats made between them at that earlier time, and now the blaze had sprung into the open again.

  Laura had been disturbed by the underlying fury she had sensed in Cass Alroy. The two men were thoroughly suspicious and jealous of each other, and she had at times sensed something almost pathological in Cass. When she was not angry with him, she was often a little afraid. But the shooting would soon be over, the picture done with. The sooner, the better. She was honed to a fine edge and she needed a rest desperately.

  Because of all these things, she had determined to use the method she’d employed several times before when a scene would not come right. She would stay in her dressing room overnight and give herself wholly to thoughts of the script and the part she was playing.

  She liked the role of Helen Bradley. For all the character’s fears—and they were justifiable—she had an inner strength and courage that made her sympathetic, even admirable. Anyone could suffer terror, but Helen Bradley could face what had to be faced, even at the risk of her life. She was one of Victor’s more thoughtful creations.

  So tonight she was here, moving about amid the echoing wilderness of camera and sound equipment, shut away from the outside world so thoroughly that nothing from beyond these windowless walls could be heard inside, and nothing here could be heard outside. She could shout her lines, if she wished, and no one would think her mad.

  Two or three naked bulbs burned in the cavernous depths, but the island of light that was the set during the day was dim and empty. Laura moved toward it cautiously, stepping over snaking cables, electrical attachments, rounding cameras on their dollies, stepping beneath the booms that moved the mikes about. Overhead, the great lights in the rafters were dark, the catwalks empty, the huge equipment motionless, silent.

  It was a strange world, so very different from the mad bustle and noise that pervaded the whole area during the day, until that moment when an assistant director shouted that this was to be a take. Then everything hushed and all attention was focused on the scene to be shot. Laura did not mind the silence, the emptiness now. There was no conflict here, no h
uman demands being made upon her. She could become Helen Bradley and live only in the confines of that small section that was the set. She knew where some of the lights were and she moved to switch them on.

  At once the stairs, the hallway, the parlor of the Bradley home sprang into vivid life. By contrast the catwalks grew all the more dim, the cameras and booms were lost in thick shadow. Only the set glowed with light, illumined in every lifelike detail. She could see the chalk marks that would enable the actors to take up exactly the same positions tomorrow that they’d occupied in the last shot.

  Bathed by the heat of the lights, Laura stepped onto the set. She stood very still for a moment, willing herself to be absorbed into this make-believe world so that it would take precedence over other reality and become the immediate present.

  Far away in the big sound stage something creaked—and was silent. Laura listened for a moment, then shrugged the noise aside. All this metal equipment had a life of its own. Just as the walls of the Quonset hut lived in their own way. Some creaking and groaning was natural as metal cooled, relaxed from the strain put upon it during the day. It was nothing. Foolish to have this sudden feeling that someone else was here in the building with her.

  Quickly she mounted the stairs that were so important a feature in the film. Stairs that ended in a platform that led to nothing. The camera never focused upon them beyond a certain point. From the platform she looked down upon the narrow hallway below and the door leading into the parlor—closed as it would be in the picture. From this high vantage point she could see over the wall of the set and glimpse part of the parlor, but she went down a few steps and put this unreality from her.

  Once her hand was on the stair rail she became Helen Bradley. She could feel the role again—it was part of her. Easily, comfortably, she ran through the entire scene. The emotion was right. She knew what Helen Bradley was feeling, yet she was completely in control of her features and movements so that this emotion would be conveyed to an audience as an actor before a camera must convey it. She did not really feel the horror of the moment when Helen discovered her husband’s body and knew that danger was abroad in the house, but she understood it, and she would portray it graphically.