Could he keep his head on tight enough, talking on the phone, to keep the helpers from suspecting that this time he was the one who needed help? He had damn well better be able to. He wasn’t at all sure what they would do once they learned that this time, for a change, he was the one climbing the walls.
At the first number he tried a woman answered, with the information that the man he wanted to talk with was out. Walworth left his number with her, asking that the man call him back, trying to sound as calm as possible. He punched out his second number, and the woman he wanted had just answered when there came the sound of the buzzer at the service door, back in the kitchen.
“Hang on a minute,” he said into the mouth-piece, and set the receiver down and tiptoed in his socks back toward the kitchen. On the way he observed that the gun was still, or once more, in his hand. Maybe the gun wasn’t real right now, either. But he held on to it anyway. Silently he put his eye to the see-through on the back door, choking back his fear. Nothing, but nothing, was going to surprise him this time.
Or so he thought until he looked.
SEVENTEEN
A sudden pounding on the front door jerked Clarissa into wakefulness. She had dozed off on the sofa, as it seemed to her only a moment before, despite the television set playing on the other side of the room, the book in her lap that she had been trying to start to read, and even her own unsettled thoughts.
She was alone in the house. About an hour ago, before the early December darkness fell, her angina had come on again. Not bad enough, she thought, to warrant calling the doctor. But still her last nitroglycerin tablet had been needed to ease the pain; with so many other matters to distract her lately, she had neglected to replenish her supply. So Judy, bless her, had volunteered to get more, and had gone off in her little car. There was no trusting the drug store these days to deliver anything, particularly in weather like this.
The pounding on the door came again before she had got herself up from the sofa, and was echoed by a chiming of the doorbell. Clarissa, straightening slowly, muttered something, belting up her robe. Her heart was beating faster with the surprise awakening, but for the moment at least there were no pains in her chest. That at least, she told herself, was something. She was now on the brink of real old age, no doubt about it, and shortly she was going to have to hire a companion, or else persuade Lenore and Andrew to try to make a go of it again with live-in servants. It wasn’t fair to Judy to depend upon her so much for the care of an old woman . . .
Most likely the knocking at the door was that of Judy herself; the girl had uncharacteristically forgotten her key for once. In her slow progress toward the front hall, Clarissa paused to switch on some lights. A quarter to five, and the sun should not be down yet, but the day outside the windows was as dark as night, and there was a heavy snowfall in the air, a regular blizzard in fact. Andrew was probably going to be stuck in the city again tonight, for once not on account of business reasons.
She flicked the outside lights on before looking out through the small viewer built into the front door at eye level. Just outside stood a man that Clarissa had never seen before, a rough-looking individual in workman’s clothing, heavy jacket and wool cap. He was big and heavy, dancing a little in the cold, rubbing one exposed, blue-stubbled cheek with the back of a work-gloved hand. In his other hand he bore a long, wood-shafted tool of some kind, resting the butt end of it on the ground like an operatic spear. The upper end had been wrapped in plastic and Clarissa could not make out what it was. Across the man’s face the falling snow made a multiple streaking blur, like a white beard.
He’s come to tell me of an accident. Judy has been hurt. That was the first thought that came into Clarissa’s mind. Simultaneously she knew there was no logical basis for this sudden fear; it was one of those chronic, baseless ones that seemed to intensify as one got older. But her knowledge did not ease the sharpness of it much.
Pain twinged now in Clarissa’s chest. Gripping her robe tightly about her with one hand, she turned the bolt back in the lock and opened the door a crack, leaving the heavy chain fastened at eye level.
Seen without the mild distortion of the viewer’s lens, the man outside impressed her at once as bluff and hearty. He was really enormous, and his blue shadow of beard reminded Clarissa somehow of her husband’s.
He smiled at her in reassurance. “Hi, missus.” His voice was deep and she found it confidence-inspiring. “My truck’s stuck out here on the highway. Okay if I come in and use your phone?”
“Oh.” Relief that there had been no accident washed through Clarissa, fluttering the pain. She smiled back, squinting into the narrow blast of frigid air that came in through the open door. “Of course,” she said, and reached to move the chain. “Come in.”
* * *
The drugstore Judy was bound for stood just across Sheridan Road from the Shores Motel, in a small shopping center that seemed to have sprung up as unplanned as a patch of weeds amid the elegance of wealthy suburban housing surrounding it to north, west and south. As usual for the time of day, northbound traffic on Sheridan was heavy and the southbound, Judy’s lane, was light as she turned off the highway into the shopping center’s parking lot. The snow was very thick, but it had not yet completely reconquered even the edges of the road since the last fall had been plowed away. A lot of places would probably have closed down early today, so that people could get started for home. Daddy wouldn’t have started home early, though; he never did.
Getting out of her car, Judy squinted through driving snow toward the bright lights of the motel across the road. She wondered if Dr. Corday’s room had been in the back or the front, upstairs or down. She had never known its number.
Last night in her bedroom he had warned her, not to be careful, but to be brave. The police now seemed to think that the danger to the family was over, and they had withdrawn their listening post. But he hadn’t talked like that at all. Anyway, Gran needed the medicine, and who else was going to get it for her?
The man ahead of Judy was buying cigarettes. Another woman was already waiting for a prescription to be filled. When Judy had handed in her scribbled paper, and it was her turn to wait, she wandered back to the front window. There she looked past magazine racks and jugs of colored water, through steamed glass that made the motel lights gigantic blurs.
A thought that had been coming and going in her mind all day returned now with sudden force. What if he came to her room again tonight? He might very well. They certainly had plenty of things in common, problems at least, that they needed to talk about.
He was old, very old, she had no doubt of that. But his age had a different quality than that of any oldster Judy had ever met. It carried no weakness. Was he older than Granny Clare or not? The question seemed meaningless, like asking whether Chinese jade was more important than baseball. It was unimaginable that he should ever have to send someone out for a prescription.
Next to the drugstore was a specialty dress shop with a wedding gown in its front window. On her way back to her car with Gran’s medicine in her pocket, Judy saw this, and the thought of buying a long white nightgown crossed her mind. Her sleepwear now was all girls’ things, teen-aged cuteness, plaids and animal designs. It was time for—something different.
As she unlocked her car door, the electric signs across the highway glared an intense loneliness at her through the blizzard. Where was he now, this moment? For just a moment she thought she was about to discover him waiting for her inside the car.
She didn’t realize just how bad visibility had become until she got behind the wheel and tried the headlights, and found they didn’t help very much. It took skill and a measure of luck to pull out of the parking lot and cross the southbound two lanes into northbound traffic, slow though all the traffic had now become. Snowdrifts seemed to be growing up right under the wheels; most of the pavement had completely disappeared.
It was odd, she thought, but the storm itself gave her no concern for him. From the fi
rst she had made it a habit not to think much about his strangenesses. But even without thinking she understood that his dangers and most of his problems were not the same ones that ordinary mortals had to contend with on most days of their lives.
Being herself a member of a family of ordinary mortals, Judy was still concerned to find out what she could about the storm and its effects, and turned on the car radio. “The Little Drummer Boy” was playing. She changed stations, to a jock babbling about a repeat of the great Chicago blizzard of ‘67. He managed to make it sound, as he managed to make everything in his world sound, like a prospect of nothing but infinite fun. But he conveyed no solid information.
For a little while she forgot the radio, having to concentrate on steering and adjusting speed so as not to ram the red tail lights just ahead. The highway, when she could see it at all through the blinded air, did not look at all like the same thoroughfare she had traversed only a few minutes ago coming south. Here a drift, though still a shallow one, had established itself all the way across, resisting the continuous work of wheels to cut a sideways segment of it into slush. At this point Judy passed her first genuinely stalled car of the night, which blocked part of what was rapidly becoming a single northbound traffic lane. She eased around it and kept going, at about ten miles per hour. Now she could once more spare a hand to switch the radio.
After three more tries she found a station giving some substantive weather information. Travelers’ advisories had been changed to warnings . . . twelve or more inches expected tonight and tomorrow . . . wind from the east, the lake effect . . . again, the great blizzard of ‘67. Judy’s memory held one vivid record of that event, a picture of a shoveled walk with walls of snow almost like those of a tunnel on either side, their tops level with her childish head.
As long as she could keep her car going at all, it didn’t seem that maintaining a more or less steady five-to-fifteen miles per hour was going to be a problem. The lights ahead were not trying to go any faster than that, and those in her rearview mirror held their distance cautiously. She counted a few more stalled cars and then stopped counting. They were already everywhere, sometimes up to their fenders in drifts, angled onto the shoulder of the road, or, in one case, right athwart an intersection and surrounded by futile pushing men. Yet still the single northbound lane kept moving, winding right and left among the fallen.
Daddy would certainly be spending the night in town . . . he did that fairly often, usually, of course, because of business . . . and Mother would be stuck in Evanston tonight, Judy supposed, camping at some friend’s house if she could reach one, at worst settling into a chair in the hospital lobby. They would be phoning home by now, most likely, giving explanations.
Luckily she reached the next intersection on a green light, so she was able to creep through without stopping. Once stopped in this, anyone without four-wheel drive might very well not get moving again. Now only half a mile more. Things wouldn’t be to bad now, even if she did get stuck. She would simply tuck her pants into her boots and make it home on foot.
But minute after minute Judy’s luck held and her skill prevailed. She reached the home driveway in falling snow so thick that she almost missed the familiar turnoff when it came. Then she spun the wheel, gunned the engine, and her car lurched into the untracked drifts of the drive. Snow caught and held it, with a great feeling of finality.
Let it stay stuck until spring; she was home. With a sigh of relief Judy turned off the engine, pocketed the keys, tightened her scarf, and got out into the blizzard.
Looking toward the house, she saw at once that the front porch light had been turned on; Gran must be up, and would of course be worried about her, about all the family scattered in the storm. Struggling toward the light, squinting at it into the teeth of the storm, Judy was halfway across the drifted lawn before it struck her that something must be wrong. To begin with, there were huge tracks in the snow just in front of the door, and more of them than she could possibly have left on her departure. Worse than the tracks, a line of interior light shone out now at the door’s edge. Gran had a thing about drafts, about keeping the cold sealed out . . .
Hurrying forward, gasping in the frozen wind, Judy tried to tell herself that what she saw were only signs that her father or mother had somehow managed to get home after all. The fantastic disasters of recent days were making her see perils and imagine monsters everywhere . . . it didn’t help at all that this scene reminded her inescapably of that other house she had so recently approached, walking alone through almost untracked snow.
She reached the door and hurried in, gasping with sheer animal relief at the cessation of cold and wind. Automatically she made sure at once that the door was snugly shut behind her.
“Gran?” In the quiet of the house Judy could hear the television still softly playing in the living room. “I’m back.” In her own ears her voice sounded louder than it ought to have, yet still it went unanswered.
The door of the closet in the front hall was standing open now, though Judy thought she could remember closing it after getting out her jacket and boots for the trip to the drugstore. Without removing any of her outdoor gear she walked on into the living room. The sofa where Gran had been was empty now, the television played for no one.
Judy walked on into the formal dining room, and stopped. Granny Clare lay on the carpet at the far end. Her old-woman’s legs were crossed, one arm pinned beneath her body and the other one outflung. It was a pose suggesting not a simple fall, but the come-to-rest position of a body that had been thrown. Even before she hurried closer and bent to look at the still face, Judy knew that her grandmother was dead.
Pulling from her jacket pocket the medicine that would not be needed now, Judy carefully set the small bottle in its paper bag on the dining room table. Then she moved dazedly for the extension phone that stood on a small table in the hall. Picking up the receiver, she realized that she had no clear idea of whom she ought to call first—and then realized that it did not matter, because the line was dead. Ice on the lines, the storm . . .
But the act of careful listening had discovered another sound, an unfamiliar one, in the still house. Judy went back to the living room—glancing involuntarily into the dining room again as she passed—but could not hear it there, even when she had switched the television off. Further exploration showed that it was coming from somewhere down the cross hall in the direction of the old wing.
At the entrance to that connecting hallway, Judy paused to listen. It was a scraping or a scratching, very soft. It fit into no niche at all in her memory. It got no louder, came no nearer. But neither did it go away. It was repetitious, but not quite rhythmical.
For the first time it dawned on Judy that whoever had attacked Granny Clare—she did not doubt for a moment that someone had—could still be in the house. Conceivably the intruder had missed hearing Judy’s return. Therefore she could now flee out into the storm again, and try to get help at a neighbor’s. Police could be called—if all the phones in the neighborhood weren’t out. Police would come—whenever the blizzard let them.
But even as she thought with part of her mind about running out of the house, Judy had taken the first steps toward her father’s study. She knew he kept a gun there in his desk . . . and now, from down the hallway, there came a new sound that stopped her dead in her tracks.
“Judy . . .” The voice was ghastly, barely louder or more distinct than the scraping that had preceded it. It brought to Judy’s mind an image of dried snakeskin, being drawn tautly over jagged bone. But despite the horror of it, the terrible change, she knew at once whose voice it was.
She ran toward it, flicking on a hallway light. To rooms on her right and left the doors stood open, and closet doors stood open inside the rooms.
In the doorway to the room that housed the pottery collection she stopped. Enormous ruin was before her. Display cases and tables had been overturned as though in some giants’ struggle, glass and pottery alike smashed into a
million pieces. Almost nothing seemed to have been left intact. The great terracotta sarcophagus that had stood in the middle of the room had been cast down from its base, and then broken, pulverized, as by madmen with sledgehammers. The lid of it was still almost intact, but it lay on its edge now yards away, beneath a window where one small pane was broken out. In through the hole a tortured tendril of the snowstorm groped, a dancing ghost in the near-darkness.
“Judy . . .”
She touched the light switch near the door. Destruction sprang out at her in all its horrible detail. A leather traveling bag, as unknown and out of place as something in a dream, lay half open in the middle of it all, and from the bag there spilled a man’s dark suit, clean shirts and ties.
Only after she took a step into the room did she see him, lying in the middle of the one large open space left on the floor.
Him? It was a scarecrow figure. It seemed to be hardly more than a suit of dark clothing that lay there, transfixed against the polished hardwood by a wooden shaft as thick as a hoe handle and a man’s height long. This incredible spear had somehow been driven down into that floor, like a gigantic nail. Where the shaft of it entered the dark coat near the right shoulder, upwelling red was already congealing and drying into brownish jelly. And everywhere around the figure, the floor and walls and wrecked furniture were marked with red-brown gouts and splashes.
Of course the bloody clothing was not really empty, no more than that sheepskin coat had been. Dark cloth moved and swelled. What turned toward Judy was more skull than face, a loved face horribly transformed. Bared teeth grinned starkly white, the cheekbones bulged sharply beside a shrunken nose. But deep in the darkened caverns of the eyes, fierce life still burned.
An Old Friend of the Family d-3 Page 14