Night Walker

by Donald Hamilton

  “Elizabeth?” Wilson laughed sharply. “Hell, no. Just try to get her on a boat! No, that’s Bunny; we’ve sailed together since we were kids. She’s the only one who — stuck by me after that Washington business broke. Got her folks to give her a boat for Christmas and then asked me to design it for her, to give me something to do except brood, I guess. I knew she was doing me a favor, but I wasn’t going to turn it down. We worked on it together, as a matter of fact; she told me what she wanted in the way of racing gadgets and general layout and I did the calculating and the drawing up of the lines.... She’s a pretty slick little bucket, eh? I wish I had a shot that showed you the lines, but you can make out the rig, all right. It takes three or four to race her right; but even a girl can handle her easy, for cruising.” Wilson’s voice was insistent and his words seemed to be coming faster now. “The binnacle is set into the cockpit floor where it’s out of the way. We’ve got good big winches for the jib sheets...”

  As Young leaned forward to study the details, there was a quick movement beside him; then something hit him across the head harder than he had ever been struck before. He tried to struggle upright, dazed and bewildered; but the man beside him, still talking rapidly as if to deceive some unseen observer — perhaps his own conscience — struck a second and a third time, driving his passenger down into black unconsciousness.

  Chapter Two

  It was the same old nightmare. Young recognized it at once although a long time had passed since the last one; so long that he had congratulated himself on having the thing licked. But here it was again, and he lay watching it unfold in his mind, knowing exactly what was coming, knowing that it was a nightmare, but feeling himself, as always, helplessly drawn into it and swept away by it.

  It took the same course as always. They were blacked out and making standard speed through a nearly calm sea when the torpedo hit forward. The one amidships followed almost immediately. He was aware, as he listened for orders and shouted some of his own — his voice cracking as he tried to make it carry over the noise — of the ship losing way and taking a sharp list to port. He was out on the flight-deck now and a roar and a hot breath of flame told him that the high-octane gas for the planes was going up. It was no longer dark. A squawking voice was repeating the order to abandon ship. There was fire everywhere and she was being shaken by a series of jolts and jars from below. He heard the screaming nearby, saw where it came from, wrapped something about his head, and started for it, wondering how much time he had. Everything seemed to be in slow motion; yet time seemed to be moving very fast. He was working furiously, less conscious of what he was doing than of the time rushing past him. Now it comes, he thought, now, and now. But it did not come, and then he was finished and over the side, and there was fuel oil on the water and the ship’s flaming bulk continued to drift down on him no matter how hard he swam....

  He awoke with a nurse holding him to keep him from throwing himself out of the hospital bed. When he lay still, warm waves of pain washed over him, gradually subsiding. Through the gaps in the bandages that otherwise completely swathed his face and head he could see the white hospital ceiling dim with night again. It had been night when they had brought him into this room. There had been a day, and now it was night again. The lapse of time disturbed him vaguely; somewhere somebody had been awaiting him. His memories were a confused mixture of what had happened long ago and what had happened quite recently.

  The terrible panic of the nightmare still lurked shadowy at the back of his consciousness. He felt the need to apologize for the disturbance he had made.

  “Sorry,” he whispered. “Didn’t mean to wake up everybody...”

  His mouth felt clumsy and shapeless, but he seemed to have all the teeth to which he was entitled. His chest hurt and there was pain all through his face, but his eyes were functioning properly. He thought, Well, I can see and talk and eat, I guess. I’m alive. I’ve got arms and legs and a head. Man, have I got a head!

  “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Mr. Wilson!” the nurse said severely. “A grown man, screaming like a baby!”

  He looked up at her blankly. Then the doctor came into the room, paused at the table by the door, and approached the bed with a hypodermic.

  “Just relax, Mr. Wilson, and I’ll give you something to help you sleep.... No, don’t try to talk now. Just lie still, please. Nurse...”

  The sting of the needle was insignificant against the other pain, but the alcohol, swabbed on the punctured skin, left a brief, cold memory behind it. He let the drug carry him away. It did not really matter that they had got his name wrong. It was not as if he didn’t know who he was....

  Suddenly it was morning and the nurse was in the room again, fussing with something at the dresser. He had past and present all sorted out now; he could differentiate old nightmares from new realities. At one time in his life he had escaped from a wrecked and burning ship; at a later time he had escaped from a wrecked and burning automobile. The first occasion was quite clear in his mind. They had given him a medal for it. The second occasion was not quite so clear; he could not remember everything that had happened, and even the parts he could remember seemed contradictory and confusing. He remembered a man in a light hat and coat, who had told a disquieting story that did not have to be true. He tried for the man’s face, but could not make it come clear. He remembered waking up screaming and being called by a name that was not his.

  “Nurse,” he whispered.

  “What is it, Mr. Wilson?” She laughed cheerfully. “You’re in the Rogerstown Memorial Hospital, if that’s what’s worrying you?”

  He hesitated. An instinct warned him to be careful. “What’s the matter with me? My face?”

  “Oh, you’re going to be all right, Mr. Wilson,” the nurse said, still working at the dresser. She was a middle-aged woman with a thick, competent body dressed in starched white. There was gray in her hair beneath the cap. “You just have a slight concussion and a few assorted cuts and burns and bruises, that’s all. In a week or two you’ll be almost as good as new,”

  He suspected that his nose was broken, and he felt as if a mule had kicked him in the chest; but he had been in hospitals before, and he knew that there was never any use in arguing with this kind of professional optimism.

  “Was there — was anybody else hurt?” he whispered cautiously, feeling his way.

  “Why, no!” she said, clearly startled at the thought that this might be worrying him. “Why, did you think you’d hit somebody? There wasn’t a soul around when the highway police got there. A farmer saw the fire and called them. They said you must have fallen asleep and driven off the road. You’re a very lucky young man, Mr. Wilson. If the door hadn’t opened and let you fall clear as the car rolled...”

  Young lay still. He could remember now his last glimpse of Lawrence Wilson, leaning over him with the iron that apparently had been lying hidden behind the seat all the time they had been talking; even so, his mind would not at once grasp the enormity that the nurse’s words suggested. He tried to burn me! He knocked me out and tried to burn me in the car! If the door hadn’t opened...

  The nurse turned dramatically to show him the bowl of flowers she had been arranging. “Aren’t they lovely, Mr. Wilson?” she cried. “I think glads are the prettiest things! Here’s the card.”

  She put it into his hand and, after a glance at the bright array of pink gladioli, he brought the card up into his limited field of vision. It was one of those comic cards you send to invalids, a cartoon of a little girl in a boat with violently shaking sails, captioned, I was all a-flutter when I heard you were sick. The card was signed, Bunny. He gave it back to the nurse; it took all his strength to hold it out long enough for her to take it. He was tiring and his thoughts were slow and muddy; and he could not seem to concentrate on the fact that he was in a hospital under the name of a man who had, for some unknown reason, tried to kill him; and that the man’s girlfriend was sending him flowers and might even decide to pay a visit
.

  “Nurse,” he whispered.

  “Yes, Mr. Wilson.”

  “Have you — got my things?”

  The nurse put the card back with the flowers. “Why, yes, they’re right here,” she said. “Except your clothes; I’m afraid you’d better not plan on wearing that suit again, Mr. Wilson. But here are your keys and your watch and your wallet. Your money’s in the hospital safe downstairs; a hundred and fifty-six dollars and some change. That’s right, isn’t it?... Oh, you want to see the wallet?”

  “Please,” he whispered.

  She put it into his hands: Lawrence Wilson’s wallet, that he had been holding in his hands when Wilson struck him down. He wondered dully where his own had got to. The wallet might have been attributed to him by mistake, but the thin, curved watch on the dresser did not belong to him, either; nor did the keys in their pigskin zipper case. And the nurse had indicated that he had been brought here wearing a suit of some kind instead of his uniform. It was clear that he had not become Lawrence Wilson by accident; the other man had apparently, after knocking him out, changed clothes with him before rolling him off the road in the car. Young tried to work out the possible motives for this in his head; but nothing came except a kind of weak resentment that he had been so easy to take.

  He studied the wallet in his hands and opened it idly as he tried to force his thoughts into some kind of constructive pattern. The little book of plastic-protected identification cards inside fell open under his clumsy fingers at the snapshot of a girl on a boat; he remembered that. He stared at the small figure in a blank sort of way; this was Bunny, who had sent him flowers. Who had sent Larry Wilson flowers, he told himself; let’s keep these identities straight.

  He remembered that his original impression of the girl in the picture had been of a kind of tomboyish innocence; strangely, she now seemed to have assumed a tough and predatory appearance, a small, lean, and catlike figure in her scanty bathing suit. She was the girlfriend of the man who had tried to kill him; the one person, according to the story, who had stuck by Wilson after he had been fired from his government job for unstated reasons that Young was now willing to accept as excellent.

  Larry Wilson’s girlfriend seemed to stare at him out of the snapshot with a flat and cruel and triumphant look, as if gloating over the injuries her man had inflicted upon him. One eye gleamed a little, wickedly. Her expression fascinated Young; it seemed as if the inanimate paper had come alive beneath its plastic covering. Then the wallet tilted a little in his hands, and suddenly all life went out of the image, leaving it gray and neutral, just a poor representation of an unknown girl in a bathing suit.

  Young frowned and regretted it; it hurt his face. He moved the wallet experimentally, and watched the gleam come back to Bunny’s left eye. He squinted along the paper and discovered the simple reason for the phenomenon: someone had written something on the back of the snapshot, causing little ridges in the photographic emulsion, one of which had caught the light in just the right way to give the picture its satanic look.

  Glancing up, Young found that he was alone in the room; the nurse had left him briefly. He could hear her footsteps down the hall through the door she had left open. The photograph shared a plastic envelope with a card of membership in some yacht club. He slipped both out, and studied the snapshot, turning it over. The back was quite blank. There was not even a sign of erasure.

  The effort of concentration was fast using up the last remnants of his strength; he lay back on the pillow, closing his eyes, feeling perspiration wet on his face beneath the bandages. Still lying there with his eyes closed, resting, he ran his thumb across the face of the picture. It seemed to him that he could detect the tiny ridges that his eyes had seen; it seemed to him also that the paper was heavier and less flexible than was customary for an ordinary snapshot print. He opened his eyes and focused on the edge of the picture and found the faint mark of lamination where a second sheet had been neatly cemented to the back of the first, the edges later trimmed to leave no unevenness. By working a corner back and forth, he made the two papers separate; they had been sealed together with rubber cement. He parted them cautiously, leaving them still attached near the bottom, and read the penciled list of names that was revealed:

  Shooting Star

  Aloha

  Marbeth

  Chanteyman

  Alice K.

  Bosun Bird

  Estrella

  There was a cryptic notation opposite each name. His mind could make no sense of any of this. He was very near to passing out; and the nurse was coming back along the corridor. He pressed the two small rectangles of paper again — the rubber cement taking hold nicely — and returned the snapshot and its companion card to the plastic envelope, and the envelope to the wallet, and dropped back to the pillow dizzily as the nurse entered the room. She came to the bed, retrieved the wallet, and moved away.

  “I’ll put it over here, Mr. Wilson,” she said.

  There was something he had to say; something he had to do. After all, he was not Lawrence Wilson, and something had to be done about this. Without opening his eyes, he whispered, “I’d like to see the doctor.”

  “Dr. Pitt’s already made his rounds,” the nurse said. “Why, what — There isn’t anything missing from your wallet is there, Mr. Wilson?” Her voice had sharpened. “I can assure you — I mean, the office always makes a list—”

  “No,” he breathed, “no, it isn’t anything like that. Everything is fine. I’d just like to talk to him for a moment. The doctor.” The nurse wouldn’t do, he thought. She would think him delirious or crazy. Besides, if he told the nurse he would have to repeat the story to the doctor anyway, and he did not have that much strength. “Please!” he whispered.

  “Well, he’s tied up right now.... Mr. Wilson, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Young breathed sarcastically. “I’m wonderful. Please will you—”

  The room had started to go around him crazily. He closed his eyes more tightly, and the bed swung away with him; and he forced them open, and the motion stopped.

  “Damn it,” he said clearly, “will you—”

  “I’ll get him when he comes out of staff meeting,” the nurse said. The promise was quick and insincere. “The minute he’s free, I’ll certainly tell him, Mr. Wilson. Now you want to rest because we’ve got a nice surprise for you. Your wife’s coming in to see you this afternoon, just for a moment this first day, and you want to be all—”

  “My wife?”

  “Yes, she’s been here several times asking about you. She drove over and is staying in town, she told me. I guess you don’t live very far from here, do you? You must feel kind of silly, driving all the way down from New York to have an accident almost at your own doorstep.... Honest, I think your wife is the loveliest person, Mr. Wilson, and that’s funny because I don’t go for people with Southern accents as a rule.... No, that’s quite enough talking for now. We’ve got to save our strength for this afternoon, don’t we? Please, Mr. Wilson, if you insist on exciting yourself, I’ll have to give you a sedative!”

  The door closed behind her. Young sank back against the pillow and lay staring helplessly at the white ceiling, trying to think, but nothing came, and he fell asleep.

  When he awoke, somebody was talking about him. He recognized the voice of Dr. Pitt. There had been some evidence of concussion, the doctor said, but the X-rays had shown no signs of skull fracture. Lacerations of face and scalp were healing normally and would probably leave no serious disfigurement; however, there might be a slight thickening of the bridge of the nose, as was usual in these cases. The patient had a badly bruised chest from being hurled against the steering wheel; but apparently no ribs had been broken. It was fortunate that the wheel had held up, the doctor said; he had seen instances of drivers impaled upon the steering column like insects on a pin.... Footsteps moved away from the bed. The low, professional murmur of voices continued for a while; then the door closed softly.r />
  Young opened his eyes, found himself alone, and lay for a while wondering to whom the doctor had been speaking: apparently, from the tone and terminology used, another doctor. He rang the bell at the head of the bed.

  “Oh, you decided to wake up at last, did you?” the nurse said playfully, coming into the room. She adjusted the bed for him and raised the blinds to let sunlight through the windows. Then she went back to the door. “He’s awake now, Dr. Henshaw,” she said, and a large, balding, middle-aged man came in. He was wearing a brown suit, and even without the nurse’s identification there would have been no doubt of his profession. In a hospital you could always tell; the doctors were the only men who seemed to feel really at home. Dr. Henshaw approached the bed briskly.

  “Well, Larry, what do you think you’ve been doing to yourself, anyway?” he demanded. He did not wait for a response, but went on: “I’ve been talking your case over with Dr. Pitt, and he thinks you’re well enough to come home and leave this room for somebody who’s really sick, haha... Nurse, will you have a stretcher brought up, please? And ask Mrs. Wilson to drive the station wagon around to the ambulance entrance....”

  In his weakened, semi-drugged condition, it was difficult for Young to be sure of anything, but the voice stirred a sort of echo — of the Navy, of home... he wasn’t sure.

  He was given little time to think or to protest, and he found himself gripped by a strange indecision. He found that he had no real desire to convince these people of the mistake they were making. A moment later he no longer had a choice. There was a certain ruthlessness to which sick people were subjected when a decision had been made as to what should be done with them; in transit they were handled like a sort of perishable but inanimate freight: gently, even tenderly, but with efficiency and dispatch. In a moment, it seemed, he was being lifted into a large, shining station wagon from which all seats except the driver’s had been removed to make room for a low cot, on which he was placed. Someone got in beside him and said in a clear, Southern voice: