The Dark on the Other Side
Page 14
It was pure accident that he saw the item at all. It was on the front page, but it was hidden down in the lowest left-hand corner, and Gordon’s name was mentioned only once, in small print. There was a photograph, and he studied the inexpressive features of the young man with interest. Copied from a formal studio portrait, the face was not distinctive. High forehead, hair and eyes of some indeterminate dark color, horn-rimmed glasses so big that they reduced the features to unimportance. Gordon’s campaign manager, William S. Wilson.
The name was familiar. Michael groped through his mental card file on Randolph for several seconds before he realized that the familiarity had nothing to do with contemporary events. The name was that of Edgar Allan Poe’s character. A nice, cheerful story that one, about a man haunted by his own ghost.
The analogy was nonexistent. Accidental death, the police believed-the strain of an exciting campaign, and too many sleeping pills. There was no reason why the young, successful assistant of a rising politician should take his own life.
Michael was curious enough to pursue the story. The next installment had retreated from page one to page fourteen, reasonably enough, since there were no dramatic developments. The assumption of accidental death was confirmed by all the evidence the police had been able to turn up. So much for William Wilson.
Michael didn’t know, then, that the seed had been planted. It had not yet taken root; it just sat there in the darkness of his subconscious mind, rubbing a little, but beginning to be encased, like a grain of sand in an oyster, by layers of protective preconceptions. But the intrusion was a seed, not a sterile piece of grit. The telephone call he got the next day started it growing.
Typically, Galen didn’t waste any words.
“Have you resolved your latest problem?” he asked, as soon as he had identified himself to his surprised listener.
“No, she’s still missing. Where are you?”
“ Paris, of course. I told you I’d be here till the end of this week. Michael, I want you to go over to my office and-”
“You’re calling me from Paris? Why?”
“If you’ll be quiet for a minute, I’ll tell you. I’m due at a symposium in about four and a half minutes. Go over to my office and pick up an envelope my secretary has for you. I’ve already spoken to her.”
“You want me to mail it to you?” Michael asked, groping.
“If I wanted something mailed to me, I’d have my secretary mail it,” Gordon said impatiently. “The envelope is for you. Go and get it now. Don’t make any decisions until you’ve read the contents.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I don’t believe I’ve used any words of over three syllables, have I? I must go now. I’ll be in touch with you as soon as I get back. And remember, don’t do anything drastic until you’ve seen that envelope.”
The receiver went down with a decisive click. Galen never bothered with hellos and good-byes.
Michael hung up. There was no use trying to call back. He didn’t know what hotel Galen was staying at, and it was more than likely that Galen would refuse to add anything to his enigmatic message even if he could be located. He was never obscure except by choice.
Michael got up and wandered over to the window. It was raining again. The sky, what little he could see of it, was a dirty gray, and the puddles in the alley reflected the sallow light with a sheen of oily iridescence. Even on the fourth floor, with the window closed, he could hear the snarl of bumper-to-bumper traffic on the street. Absently, Michael drew his initials in the smeary film on the inside of the pane. The hell with it. He wasn’t going all the way across town on a day like this just to pick up an envelope.
The foul evening darkened, the rain beat a peremptory tattoo against the window. Michael wandered the apartment like a caged lion, unable to settle down or even to understand the strange sense of uneasiness that grew, slowly but steadily. Unable to concentrate and unwilling to go out, he puttered with small jobs he had been putting off; he put a new light bulb in the kitchen and started to cook himself something to eat. It was then that he discovered he had given Napoleon the hamburger. There was nothing else fit to eat except various things in cans, and he realized he wasn’t hungry anyhow. He was too nervous to eat.
Nervous. Slowly Michael let himself down into a chair and considered the word. He reviewed the symptoms: taut muscles, mildly queasy stomach, restlessness, general malaise of mind. Yes, that was his trouble; he was as nervous as a cat… He gave the somnolent Napoleon a look of hate, and revised the figure of speech. He hadn’t had the symptoms for years, that was why he had been so slow to recognize them-not since college exams, or the early days of his working career, when a particular interview, or letter, or telephone call might make or break his new-hatched confidence in himself. So why now, when there was nothing hanging over him that really mattered?
The thing hit him with the violence of an earthquake, but it was nothing physical, nothing that any of the conventional senses would have recognized. Yet it was as peremptory as the sudden shrilling of a telephone in a silent room. It summoned, like a shout; it tugged at the mind like a grasping hand. It lasted for only a second or two, in measurable time; but while it lasted, the room faded out and gray fog closed in around him. He was conscious of nothing except the calling. Even the hard seat of the chair under him and the solidity of the floor beneath his feet seemed to dissolve. It stopped as abruptly as it had begun. There was no fading out, merely a cessation.
Michael found himself on his feet. His face was wet with perspiration, and his knees were weak. Blinking like a man who has emerged from a cave into bright sunshine, he looked around the familiar kitchen, and found its very normalcy an affront. The table was still a table; it rocked slightly under the pressure of his hand as it always did. It ought to have changed into an elephant or a tortoise. The view from the kitchen window should not be the normal view of night darkness; it ought to show an alien sun over some weird landscape. The thing that had invaded his mind was as shattering and as inexplicable as any such transformation.
But the most incredible thing about the experience was that he accepted it. He knew, not only what the calling was, but who had sent it. Knew? The verb was too weak; there was no word in the language for the absolute, suprarational conviction that filled his mind.
He was still a little unsteady on his feet as he crossed the room. He noticed that Napoleon was no longer in his favorite place by the door. Evidently the cat had left, and he hadn’t even heard him go.
His desk was covered with papers, notes, books. Michael didn’t touch any of them. Slumped in his chair, his eyes fixed on vacancy, he thought. It was one of the hardest jobs he had ever done in his life; methodically, he examined and demolished all the guideposts he had established in the past ten days-as well as a few mental monuments that had been standing a lot longer. It left his conscious mind pretty bare. He didn’t try to construct any new theories to fill it up. He couldn’t yet.
The urgent impulse that still gripped him, even though its stimulus had vanished, did not interfere with his thinking; it occupied a level much more basic than reason or conscious thought. It was rather like an overpowering hunger or thirst. But he couldn’t yield to it yet; a man who walks along a contaminated stream knows, even though his throat is a dusty agony, that he cannot relieve the pain until he finds clear water.
Why hadn’t he gone out, that afternoon, to get the envelope Galen wanted him to have? The office was closed now, and he didn’t know the secretary’s last name, or address.
The contents of that envelope must concern Randolph, and they must be important. That conclusion wasn’t intuitive; it was the result of logic. Galen’s reaction that night, when he learned the identity of the fugitive, had been markedly peculiar. He hadn’t been merely surprised; he had been worried. That last, hasty spate of advice had also been uncharacteristic: Don’t do anything, don’t take any action whatsoever. I’ll discuss it with you when I get back.
Unless one of the Randolphs had been Galen’s patient. Michael dismissed that theory at once. Under no circumstances would Galen discuss a patient’s case with him. No, the connection had to be something else; and Michael had a pretty good idea as to what it must be.
He tried to remember his first impressions of Galen, but he couldn’t pin them down; Galen had just been one of the Old Man’s friends, too antique to be interesting. Galen must be over sixty-he had to be, if he and the Old Man had been at school together in Europe, before the last big war. He didn’t look it. Physical fitness was something of a fetish with him. Not surprising, perhaps, after the two-year hell of a concentration camp and the desperate years of underground fighting that had preceded the camp. More surprising was Galen’s mental stability. There was a certain ruthlessness under that passionless exterior of his, but he was as free of bitterness as he was free of optimism. It was revealing, perhaps, that he never spoke of the war years, or of the wife and small son who had been devoured by the holocaust. His reference to his boyhood pet was one of the few times Michael had ever heard him mention his childhood. His parents, too…
It was Michael’s father who had been primarily responsible for getting Galen out of the chaos of postwar Germany; the kind of help the old man had given during those years had never been made explicit to Michael, by either man; but after his father’s death, Galen was-there. Silent, withdrawn, unsentimental-but there.
Michael shook himself mentally. This was a sidetrack, a waste of time. There was no point in speculating when, in a few hours, he would have the answer in his hands. In the meantime…
He thought for another hour. At the end of that time he finally moved, but not much; when he finished, there was on the table a single sheet of paper. It contained only four names, in Michael’s cramped writing, but he contemplated the meager results of his labors with grim satisfaction.
Then he picked up the pen and added a phrase after three of the names.
William Wilson. Dead. Suicide?
Tommy Scarinski. Nervous breakdown; attempted suicide.
Joseph Schwartz. Breakdown; drugs.
He paused, pen poised, studying the list. Incredulity was hard to conquer. It seemed so unlikely… Yet there they were, four of the people who had been closest to Gordon Randolph in his adult life. His campaign manager and friend, and his three prize students during that single year as a teacher-a position, surely, that gives a man or woman enormous influence over younger minds. And of those three, one was still a nervous wreck, and another had retreated from a promising career into a world of drug-induced terrors. And the third…
The third was Randolph ’s wife.
III
Threading a tempestuous path through a mammoth traffic jam, Michael blasphemed the beautiful weather and the long weekend. The balmy sunshine had infected half the inhabitants of the city with the urge to flee to Nature. Galen’s secretary was one of them. It was after ten that morning when the answering service told him the office wouldn’t be open, and he had wasted more time in a futile attempt to track down Galen’s secretary. Finally he drove to Galen’s house and harassed his manservant until the poor devil consented to open up the office and help him search. That had taken several more hours-the harassment, not the search. Whatever her other failings, Galen’s secretary did what she was told. The envelope, with Michael’s name typed neatly on it, was in the top drawer of her desk.
Badly as he wanted to examine the contents, another need was stronger. He had wakened that morning with a renewed uneasiness, not so demolishing as the call that had summoned him the night before, but constant and peremptory. He was on his way now to answer it.
He braked, swearing, as a blue Volkswagen roared blithely past on the left and ducked into the nice legal margin between Michael’s car and the rear of the one ahead of him. He couldn’t even think in this chaos; driving took too much concentration, with so many morons on the road.
He resisted the childish desire to drive right up onto the back fender of the Volkswagen. Today, of all days, he couldn’t take any chances. The afternoon was far gone; but he would reach his destination in two or three hours, and by that time he had to have a clearer idea of what he meant to do when he got there. So far the demand had been strong and basic, blotting out all thoughts but one: Get there. Sooner or later, though, he would have to make a plan. He couldn’t stand on Andrea’s doorstep waiting for another message from Beyond.
Linda must be at Andrea’s. It was the only place she knew, the only potential ally who had not failed her. Michael had reached that conclusion logically; direction was one of the elements the mental call had lacked. Gordon had already searched the witch’s cottage, which did not lessen the probability of Linda’s being there now; the safest hiding place is one that has already been investigated. But she would be wary of visitors in general and hostile toward Michael in particular. Remembering the telephone book, open to the page with Galen’s name, Michael felt the same mixture of shame and chagrin that had moved him originally. He wasn’t proud of his performance that night. To say the least, it had been stupid. She probably thought of it as betrayal. No, she wouldn’t let him into the house, not unless the days of loneliness and fear had reduced her courage to the breaking point. He might have to break into the house-a prospect he faced with surprising equanimity. For such a purpose, darkness would be useful.
But when he stopped at a restaurant in the next town, it was not only because of the need to kill a little more time. He couldn’t wait any longer to see what was in Galen’s envelope.
It was a big Manila envelope and it was sealed not only by tape but by a heavy wad of sealing wax. The wax was fresh and the envelope clean, which meant that the material it contained must have been gathered together only recently. It was not one of those envelopes so dear to writers of sensational fiction, which has been moldering for years in a secret hiding place until the deus ex machina of the book produces it just in time to foil the villain. The envelope was not bulky. It could not contain more than a dozen sheets of paper.
When he had the papers in his hand, Michael sat staring blindly at them for a while before he started to read. He had been expecting what he found; it was, after all, the most logical connecting link between Galen and Randolph. But it was still something of a shock to see again the sprawling, angular handwriting that had once been as familiar as his own.
A letter a week for almost seven years, arriving every Tuesday morning. Careless and unmethodical as his father was about other things, he wrote every Sunday. Michael never kept personal letters after he answered them; there certainly had been no particular point in saving his father’s. They were good letters, informative and amusing because of their acidulous comments on people, books, and events. So far as he could remember, the old man had never mentioned Randolph. Which was not surprising; by the time he had left home, Randolph was no longer a student.
His father had written less frequently to Galen, but he had kept up a regular correspondence with his old friend. Galen never threw anything away. These letters were only a small part of the mass of materials that were docketed, labeled, and filed-both in the neat cabinets filling several rooms of Galen’s house, and in the latter’s capacious memory. Galen had not kept these letters because of a premonition. But he would not have produced them now unless they had significance.
After these optimistic deductions, the first letter was a disappointment. It didn’t even mention Randolph ’s name.
Professor C
ollins rambled on for two pages about the petty gossip and activities of the university. Michael knew that some of the ivory towers were rat infested, but he had forgotten how largely small malices can loom, even to a mind that is supposed to wander in the airy realms of ideas. Cheating on examinations, unexpected pregnancies, a rumor of students dabbling in black magic…Nothing was new on the campuses. There was only one name mentioned in the letter, that of a student for whom his father had high hopes. His name was not Randolph.
Puzzled and deflated, Michael put the letter aside. Maybe Galen’s secretary had made a mistake, or else Galen had told her to include all the letters dated to a particular year. He could hardly quote specific identifying details over the telephone, especially when he hadn’t read the letters for over ten years.
Michael felt sure of this hypothesis when he started the next letter and found Randolph ’s name in the opening paragraph. The context was not precisely what he had come to expect of Gordon Randolph.
“These sporadic flashes of brilliance baffle me,” his father had written of the school’s star athlete and president of the student body. “I expected great things of the boy, he’s already a school legend, but he never happened to take any of my courses until this year-which is his last. I’d say that literature simply wasn’t his field, if it weren’t for that rare outstanding essay.”
The rest was inconsequential, for Michael’s purposes. There was another reference to the devil worshipers, whose existence was now a well-established rumor. His father found them exasperating, whoever they were: “They’ve been reading about the Hellfire Club and decided to imitate that bunch of nasty-minded little-”