by Otto Penzler
I don’t know what kept me in that tomb-smelling room, unless it were fear of the haunting uncertainty of the thing. Some malign fate seemed amok among my friends; tomorrow, unless I learned its source of power, it might strike nearer home. . . .
No one else had seen the small white thing clutched by those stiff white fingers. No one saw me as I stooped to wrest the thing from their clasp.
The fingers were soft to the bone, pulpy as though maggot-ridden. I forced myself to delve there . . . and the woman’s hand turned to putty in mine, like a squashed putrescent fruit! I was a man; I didn’t get sick on the spot. That would come later.
In her hand had been a membership card to the Quadrangle Club.
CHAPTER TWO
ONE TICKET TO HELL
“Snap out of it,” Duke kept telling me, on the way back. “You’re white, Barry. Well, do you know any more than I do? The sarge seemed to think you might. I’d like to get it into a six o’clock extra.”
I didn’t answer, because I was swallowing to keep my stomach where it belonged. Besides, what was there to say? Duke had a nose; he knew as much as I did.
Was it true, or was my imagination playing tricks on my memory? That last time Andy had retreated from me, at the Antler Bar, hadn’t I thought, “What ghastly shaving lotion the lad uses!” For there had been a super-abundance of scent about him, a scent with sickly-rancid undertones. . . . God, it was true! Whatever they died of, these ill-fated things, they’d been dying of it for a long time before! Some loathsome disease, that rotted all of them, heart and brain last. . . . I swallowed, harder than ever, and managed to talk. “Looks like the dissolution of the upper classes. The snootiest club in town is really getting something to turn its nose.” And I showed him the rumpled card I’d torn from those rotted fingers.
“Shut up,” Duke said sharply. “You’re letting it get you. Come back with me while I put the Chronicle to bed. She’ll run an article on the Quadrangle Club that ought to stop the slaughter. You might have two cents to put in.”
I said, “No,” because I remembered, with tightening heart muscles, that I hadn’t located Bonny all day. And she had told me that morning that she owed the cost of Andy’s funeral to—the Quadrangle Club! No wonder she had looked as though doom were a little way off, watching her helpless struggle with malevolent and unfathomable eyes! It was enough to drive a man mad, that sinister shadow whose substance I could not perceive!
There was no need to phone. I knew, when I saw the mink coat and black hat on a couch in the foyer, that I had a most welcome guest. I heard the automatic playing the Pathetique symphony.
Bonny crouched, head buried in her elbows, in a big chair. Her small, black-robed body swayed mournfully to the third movement. God, I was glad to see her—and not to—to smell her!
She was pure, thank God, and untainted. Still had the same faint toilet water scent about her, woodsy with lavendar . . . she winced when I put my hands on her shoulders.
“Bonny, where have you been all day?” I asked anxiously.
She turned to me a white face in which the violet eyes looked like great bruises. “Dodging reporters,” she answered. “Barry, I have to stay here tonight.”
“You can’t,” I answered, with a sharpness that was as much reproof to myself as to her. “There aren’t enough rooms. And—” I added, laughing feebly—“no chaperone.”
“Chaperone!” She laughed with me, but it was a high, uncomfortable laugh that made my flesh creep. “Bitter music,” she commented, and then: “What do I need with a chaperone? I want protection, just for tonight.”
I shook her, for she was still laughing in that bitter, almost hysterical way, but it had no effect. “Bonny, you’ve got to tell me! What are you afraid of?”
She shuddered. “Everything—even you. You’ve been wicked in your time, haven’t you, Barry? Awfully wicked . . . but I love you.”
That wasn’t like Bonny. I’d told her all about myself, and the low-lights of my past, and she’d been pretty magnanimous about it. She wasn’t one to rake up old ashes. Suddenly I hated that poignant music; like a crossed child, I snatched the record. I heard the needle whine once, and then the third movement of the symphony was in a hundred fragments on the floor.
“I felt that way—once,” Bonny told me. She had stopped laughing. Her voice was flat, hopeless. “Now it doesn’t matter. Can I stay tonight, Barry? It may be the last time I’ll ever be near you. . . .”
I shouted, “For God’s sake, talk straight! If you’d only tell me what’s terrifying you—you can’t stay here. Think, Bonny. We buried Andy this morning. You don’t want to go to hell tonight, do you?”
She had resumed her rocking back and forth, in the cradle of her own arms. “Andy this morning,” she crooned. “Tomorrow—Kitty. And the day after—who knows? Maybe Bonny. Poor Kitty. Poor Bonny.”
I couldn’t bear the picture her insane singsong conjured in my mind. Bonny with her tawny hair to die like Kitty! I slapped my sweetheart, hard. She whimpered—and laughed!
I remember pleading and haranguing alternately, but nothing shook Bonny from her mad mood. I shot questions about the Quadrangle Club at her, but she kept crooning and laughing to herself, in the ghastly mockery of a lullaby. Finally I said, “I’m calling up your mother. She’ll spank you for this.”
“Mother’s gone,” said Bonny. “Poor Mother!” A telephone call to the Carters’ proved she was right, for the time being, anyway.
I’d had enough skirting on the edge of nerve-strangling mystery. I could think of only one man who might know something—a very little something—and if I pooled my knowledge with his, we might together find a ray of blessed light.
“Suki,” I shouted, forgetting that there were still human ears left not deafened by madness. “Take care of Miss Carter. Don’t let anyone in. I’ll be back in an hour.” I handed the boy my gun. He blinked, and nodded. Suki was a good boy, loyal and intelligent.
Bonny laughed as I walked out into the night.
DUKE WASN’T AT the office when I got there. They told me he’d gone to check some material for a special article on the Quadrangle Club, featured for front page release in the morning. I groaned, fell into Duke’s swivel chair, and waited.
There wasn’t much humor in Duke’s face when he came in, at eleven-thirty. He took one look at me, and said, “When did you eat last?”
“I don’t know. Maybe this morning.”
“Let’s step across the street. I won’t say what I have to say to a guy with an empty stomach.”
I didn’t like the ham and eggs. I wouldn’t have liked nectar and ambrosia, at that point. But Duke sat over me sternly, making me gulp the stuff down anyhow, and he only relaxed over my half-finished cup of coffee.
“I’ve been over to the Quadrangle Club,” he said harshly. “An umpty layout; big brownstone front, thick curtains, and a stuffed butler at the door. Couldn’t get in, though. God knows how they’ve kept the cops out after today’s high-jinks. They sponsored the funeral, didn’t they? Well, you need a ticket from the Social Register to crash. I didn’t want to waste time.”
I said I’d heard all that before. The Quadrangle Club had been one of those things in the background all my life, like the Horse Show.
“My lad,” said Duke, his face one long grimace from the bald spot on his brow to the cleft in his narrow chin; “do you know whom I saw in the lobby, just past the butler?”
“No. You look as though it might have been a ghost.”
“Correct,” said Duke. “It was Andy Carter.”
There are points beyond which the mind cannot go, discrepancies of evidence which only the insane may enter and live. I knew, as soon as Duke told me that I believed him. And I know, too, that something snapped in my brain. It had to. I started moving, and moving fast.
First, I drove through every red light on the route to my own apartment. I wasn’t surprised to find Suki blubbering and frantic, and Bonny gone. That was part of the grotesquely
hideous nightmare.
“Miss Carter get telephone call. I not can stop her. She say—” Suki paused, and there was stark fear in his face—“her brother want her, she go. Is not Miss Carter’s brother dead this morning?”
Dead! Kitty Anders must have been dead a week before she stopped moving about in the land of the living! What was to keep a corpse from rising then, if the dead forgot to die?
It was only after I got to the Quadrangle Club that the horror stopped. I put one finger on the doorbell and kept it there. The door opened to the width of a man’s arm. Something bright flared astoundingly in my face, and blinded me. I didn’t see or feel whatever it was that smashed down on my skull and sent me into oblivion with a burst of shooting stars.
I FELT MY head going round and round, just before I opened my eyes, I expected to wake up in hell, but they’d canceled that trip, apparently, because I was in my own bed, with Suki’s worried brown face bending over me, and Duke Livingstone’s back between me and the window.
Duke’s mouth puckered as he turned. “Still with us?” he said. “When I found you in the gutter, you looked as though you had been done in for good.” He paused and then exploded: “Nerts. What a set-up! The cops won’t even touch it!”
My mouth was dry, and there was a weight on top of my head, where I’d been cracked, that seemed a truckload. I said, “I’m not so sure,” and reached for the phone. Sergeant Connor told me cheerily that everything was under control.
“Then why the hell don’t you raid that place?” I told him.
The sergeant answered, his cheer considerably shaken, “Now, me boy, we can’t raid a respectable private club because of a coincidence.”
“A damned peculiar coincidence!”
His voice dropped to a whisper. “We got orders—not to touch it!” When I expostulated, there was a soft click. . . .
“Barry, there’s only one way.” Duke’s voice was weary, as though he’d been up every night for a million years. “You’ve got that ticket I haven’t got. You’re a Social Register lad. Get in touch with the Quadrangle Club, and apply for membership.”
It was a ticket, all right. A ticket to hell. But maybe I’d find Bonny in hell. . . . A brisk secretarial voice at the other end of the wire told me I would be investigated, and if I furnished the customary references, my membership would be considered. . . .
Duke’s article on the front page of the Chronicle that morning was one of those brave dam-fool things that only cub reporters and veteran editors have the nerve to do. He told his story simply, starting with Andy’s funeral. There was Grant’s suicide, and Kitty’s. He stated flatly that Kitty hadn’t killed herself for Grant’s sake. “The popular young matron,” said he, “was anything but a faithful and loving wife.”
He hauled over the Quadrangle Club, briefly mentioning its history as a tony haven for the best people of the Eighties; and he posed the question, reasonably enough. “Why has the hacha generation of blue-bloods joined the brownstone tradition? Can it be that behind those venerable portals there is a stimulus for those jaded appetites; a pleasure so exhaustive that its ending leaves nothing but self-loathing and desire for death?”
Duke grinned at me when I looked up at him, like a small boy who has made an offensive precocious remark and expects to be told how bright he is.
I said, “Nice work, Duke. I’m glad you left your latest hunches about the Carters out of it. That was decent.”
“A newspaperman is never decent. I left that out because I may not have proof.”
“Proof!” I howled. “You can’t prove anything. The Chronicle’s going to run into the biggest libel suit in history.”
Duke smiled his sad, crooked smile. “Maybe. But it won’t go to trial tomorrow. And by the time we get our day in court, I’m gambling we’ll have proof enough to halt the whole blamed mess.”
I was finishing the second cup of black coffee. “And where would you be getting it?” I said.
Duke didn’t answer, just kept looking at me.
“I know,” I said. “You think I’m going to get it for you. God, I hope I can! I hope I can find Bonny—” I didn’t dodge his whimsical blow to the chin. It was his way of bucking me up.
“You’ll find her,” he assured me. “If there’s anyone who can crack the story, it’s you. If you want an expense account on the Chronicle . . .”
I said, “No. I’m on my own.”
“Got to be going,” said Duke. “Think it over, Barry. A big paper has resources. Files of information, contacts . . . it can send you inside places you couldn’t crack yourself. It’s a help.”
I agreed with him. It was the brightest ray of light I’d seen yet. Duke gave me a press card, informing the police that Barry Amsterdam was working for the New York Chronicle, and left me to my own devices.
CHAPTER THREE
DOOM CRACKS ITS WHIP
Judge Rainey told me that afternoon in his office, “If I hadn’t known your uncle, Barry, I’d throw you out! What do you mean, I’m blocking a police investigation! Why would I do a thing like that? Why, I don’t even belong to the damned club!”
“But,” I insisted, “you’re the only political force in town that could. The others don’t come from your kind of family.”
The Judge, a big man with a magnificent silver head, forgot that he’d known my uncle. He threw me out. . . .
It seemed hopeless, hopeless. It might be three weeks before I’d pass that brownstone front myself, and in the meantime, Bonny . . . I felt dry in the throat every time I thought of Bonny. It was like the thirst of a dying man lost in the Sahara.
Something made me look up as I walked through the front lobby of the office building. Something indescribably vile . . . and familiar. An odor of the charnel-house . . .
A woman, swathed to the eyebrows in silver fox, had just passed me. I recognized her at once as Judge Rainey’s young and beautiful second wife. I ran after her, and grabbed her arm. She turned, and . . .
I—I had known Thea Rainey as one of the town’s huskier young glamor girls, seen her cantering an hour after dawn, heard her throaty alive laugh . . . and now I saw her with the cancer of death almost victorious in her wasted frame!
“Barry Amsterdam,” she said, and then she laughed—but what a laugh! The ghost of her youth, chuckling in hell . . . and, God help her, she stank. Under the heaviness of her perfume, there was a rank odor of decaying flesh. . . .
I had dropped her arm, but she retrieved mine. I shuddered at the touch, and she knew it, and licked her lips.
“They’ll get you too,” she whispered. “You’re a nice lad, Barry. Once—you didn’t know it, did you?—I fancied I loved you. They’ll bring you to me in death, Barry . . . they’ll let me kiss you. . . .”
I went back to Thea’s apartment with her. It took every ounce of stomach I had, but I went. She promised she’d talk, if we were alone . . . she even seemed to know where Bonny was. . . .
Her butler served us sandwiches and highballs. She touched neither. When I had pleaded with her for agonizing minutes, she rose. Her chalky face assumed an expression of terrible despair.
“You want to know what they do to us?” she whispered, tensely, crazily. “I’ll show you!” Before I could stop her, she had zipped her dress open from throat to hem. She stepped out of it. I cried, “Stop!” but she didn’t stop. She stepped out of her slip, and I saw the white diaphragm below her brassiere, gleaming uncleanly . . . she tore off the brassiere, and the silk shorts. In hideous nudity, she advanced one step toward me. Her breasts, her hips, seemed half-decomposed . . . and the smell! It was like the fumes that might arise from a city’s garbage lying for hours under an August sun. . . .
And then I was engulfed in a putrefaction that had been the beauty of Thea Rainey. Her arm, white as the underside of a fish belly, twined about my neck, she pressed her naked body to me, she darted her face close to mine.
I felt the kiss of loathsome death, and when I would have withdrawn, she pressed
closer. Then—I’ve read about lips melting in an embrace, but I’ll never read it again without being sick. For that was exactly what Thea’s lips did. They squashed, with the same hideous plosh of rotten fruit that had marked the disintegration of Kitty’s hand. . . .
I didn’t turn to look. I ran. My mouth felt ghoulishly filthy, as though I were a cannibal epicure. I ran right to the Chronicle office.
“Duke,” I said, “I know why the police won’t touch it. It’s not Rainey. It’s Rainey’s wife. . . .”
And then I was suddenly very sick.
THEA RAINEY’S FUNERAL was held next day at St. Anne’s. Society was there; but it was a weirdly changed society from the polite group that had met two days before at Andy Carter’s funeral. In fifty hours, the upper crust of Manhattan had been transformed to a cowering half-idiocy . . . no one mentioned the haste of the burial. We were thinking of other things. Each of us seemed menaced by some unholy destruction. We did not speak to each other.
More, by two score, were the faces that wore an expression of hopeless despair. And we knew, we who had escaped so far, that they were the doomed . . . they told us nothing, though they had been our friends, and our loved ones.
There was a great wreath of flowers from the Quadrangle Club. But its roses and lilies were not enough to combat the mingled odor of strong perfumes that rose from those who had come to honor the dead. Perfumes that covered a vague but unmistakeable odor of decay. Thea Rainey had been embalmed cleverly; they had drained her blood and replaced the broken features with wax. But for her friends, the dying, no such service had been rendered.
I didn’t go to the burial. I needed fresh air. I walked aimlessly about town that forenoon. I wasn’t quite sane, I think. A dozen times, I followed some woman simply because she had red hair . . . but she was never Bonny.
Bonny! Had the thing touched her yet, the filthy disease that a doctor, in Thea’s case, had despairingly named heart disease? Why hadn’t she been at the funeral? Was she stolen, or killed?