7 Steps to Midnight

by Richard Matheson

  The waiter blinked, obviously taken aback by Chris’s perfect French. Chris lifted the cork in front of the waiter and added, coldly, “Le bouchon est ni mouillé, ni moelleux.”

  “Monsieur?” There was a hint of fluster in the waiter’s voice.

  “Apparemment, la bouteille n’a pas été inclinée comme il se doit.” Chris snapped, aware that Alexsandra was gaping at him.

  “Monsieur, je—” the waiter began, protesting mildly.

  Chris cut him off. “De l’air a pénétré a l’interieur et a oxidé le vin.” He tossed the cork onto the table and waved away the bottle in distaste. The intimidated waiter carried it off.

  Chris looked at Alexsandra. Her mouth was hanging open. Suddenly aware of it, she closed it. “What was that?” she asked incredulously.

  “A little French,” he said.

  “A little?” She stared at him in amazement. “You spoke it like a native.”

  “I took a course once,” he said, grinning. “And I have a good memory.”

  She couldn’t seem to get over it. “You must be a genius.”

  He chuckled, embarrassed. “No,” he said.

  She shook her head, still impressed. “What did you say to him?”

  “Uh… let’s see if I can remember. I… asked him first if he really thought I was going to sniff the cork; obviously that’s what he expected me to do. Then I told him that the cork was… not wet, not flexible, that apparently—I gave him a shot on that word—the bottle hadn’t been properly stored and air had gotten into it and oxidized the wine.” He grinned. “I think I impressed him.”

  “You positively decimated him,” she said in an awed voice. “I can’t get over it.”

  “Shucks, ma’am, ’twarn’t nuthin’.”

  “I think you are a genius,” she said. “Tell me about yourself.”

  “Oh… it’s not that interesting.”

  “Please,” she said.

  “Well…” He hesitated. “Okay, the Reader’s Digest version, then. I was born in Tucson. My father died when I was three. My mother is a college teacher—English. She raised my sister and me in a learning atmosphere. I started reading at five. We were taken to concerts, plays, lectures, museums. When I showed an aptitude for mathematics, she enrolled me in a special school. She used to—”

  He broke off as the waiter returned with another bottle of wine. Trying to ignore Alexsandra’s lowered head and repressed amusement, Chris again assumed the icily haughty expression and, when the waiter poured him a half-inch of wine to taste, he ran it around in his mouth, then sucked in a hissing breath of air, lips pursed, the way he’d once seen an expert do it at a wine-tasting contest. He made a sound as though to say, well, I guess it will have to do since you obviously have nothing better.

  As the waiter began to pour, Chris spoke to him irritably. “Ne remplissez pas le verre a plus d’un tiers, s’il vous plaît,” he said. “Je voudrais que le bouquet se developpe de lui-měme.”

  “Oui, Monsieur, absolument,” the waiter replied, sounding totally cowed now.

  After he’d left, the bottled-up laughter in Alexsandra burst out and she looked at Chris in delight. “What did you tell him now?” she asked.

  “Not to fill the glass more than a third full; that I wanted the bouquet to develop on its own.”

  “You must be a wine connoisseur.”

  He made a scoffing noise. “Not at all,” he said. “It’s just a good memory.”

  She raised her glass of wine and held it out toward him. “To your incredible memory,” she said.

  He held out his glass. “To whatever fate put us together.”

  They gazed at each other for a few moments, then Alexsandra drew in a quick breath, as though restoring herself, and took a sip of the wine. She looked at him inquiringly as he took a sip of his. “Is it good?” she asked.

  “God, I dunno,” he said. “All I ever drink is Diet Coke.”

  Her laughter enchanted him. He tried hard to put from his mind any uncertainty about her, because, whatever else he felt, he was hopelessly in love with her.

  “You were telling me about yourself,” she said.

  “Oh.” He mock-scowled. “Not very interesting.”

  “Very interesting,” she disagreed.

  “Well… okay. I’ll get through it as quickly as I can. My mother used to fill our house with guests—throw little mental soirées, I guess you’d call them. My uncle Harry came a lot; he’s a pretty well-known physicist. Teachers. Educators. Writers. Musicians. Even politicians. My sister and I were always welcome, even when we were little kids. They treated us like equals.”

  “That must have been exhilarating,” Alexsandra said.

  “Intellectually, sure,” he conceded. “I drank it all up. That, in addition to my early reading and my mother’s tutoring, helped me to graduate from grade school at eleven, high school at fourteen, earn my first bachelor’s degree at seventeen.”

  “You are a genius, aren’t you?” she said, that look on her face again.

  “No, no.” He didn’t want her to think of him that way. “I’m pretty good at mathematics, that’s all. I have that kind of brain.”

  “How many degrees do you have?”

  “Oh… three or four.” He suppressed a smile. “Actually, you should be addressing me as Dr. Barton,” he told her. “But if you do,” he added quickly, “I’ll dive through this window and swim back to the dock.”

  They smiled at each other. He was feeling better now. The wine on his empty stomach had helped, blurring away the hard edges. Now he was starting to feel the way he wanted to when they’d first gotten on the boat. The harp music and the gliding glass Bateau-Mouche, the lighted city of Paris and the candlelight illuminating Alexsandra’s stunning face added up to the proper sum—a relaxed, romantic peace. He took another sip of wine, then poured each of them a second glassful.

  “Won’t the waiter see that you’re not making it only one-third full?” she teased.

  “Screw him,” he muttered, smiling crookedly.

  When the waiter returned and took their order, Chris thoroughly confused him by pretending that he couldn’t read a word of the menu and let Alexsandra carefully translate for him.

  “That’ll give him something to think about,” he said as the waiter left.

  “Now he won’t know what to think,” she said, laughing.

  “I have a confession,” he told her. “That stuff about the wine came from a scene in a mystery novel; the hero does that to a nasty waiter. Murder by the Numbers. Jessica Wayne.”

  “I’m still amazed,” she said.

  He looked at her intently. The glow of the wine inside his head gave him the courage to ask impulsively, “Where did you get that ring?” He had to know.

  “This?” she held up her left hand. “I liked it so much in the painting, I had a copy made.”

  Oh, for God’s sake, he thought; he felt disgusted with himself. How simple could it be? He reached across the table impulsively. She gave him her right hand and he kissed it lingeringly, then looked up, smiling, at her.

  “I feel a lot better,” he told her.

  ***

  “Tell me what you do, Chris,” she said.

  The dinner had been sumptuous, the conversation warmly intimate. She’d told him about her childhood in England, her family and her education. He’d managed to put from his mind the things that had been happening to him since it had all begun that night at the plant.

  The blurring at the edges of vision and thought had lessened as they ate. Now her question brought it all back and he felt a sense of keen regret about that. He was sorry she’d asked.

  “I thought you didn’t want to know,” he said.

  “I didn’t before, but now I’m curious. It must really be important to justify everything that’s happened to you.” She looked at him in silence. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she said, her tone a little hurt.

  “Oh…” He looked pained. “I do
n’t mind telling you. It’s just… I’ve been having such a good time, I hate to go back to it.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to spoil things.”

  He sighed. “Okay.” Picking up the glass, he swallowed the last of his wine. “What do I do?” he said. “I try to find an answer to the turbulence problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It has to do with lasers,” he explained. “They don’t propagate—transmit, that is—through the atmosphere because of turbulence, which is a kind of distortion in the atmosphere that prevents the laser from delivering enough energy to destroy a target.”

  “A target,” she repeated.

  His smile was rueful. “I told you that all I’m doing is contributing to the troubles of the world.”

  “Doesn’t that bother you?” she asked.

  “To quote a lovely young woman I know: ‘It came over me gradually.’”

  She sighed. “Touché,” she murmured.

  “Anyway, that’s what I work on,” he continued. “I try to set up theoretical equations, in what we think tankers call ‘an analytically tractable form,’ then do the calculations on a computer.”

  “I don’t really know what that means,” she said, “but… Well, have you had success?”

  “A lot of it,” he said. He made a face. “Up to a point. Then I ran out of steam. I haven’t done anything useful for some time now.” He made a sound of derisive amusement. “Which makes this whole damn thing ridiculous. If whoever’s behind it really knew how lame my work has been for the past few months, they wouldn’t have bothered.”

  “Well, obviously, they don’t feel that way,” she said. “What you’re working on must still be regarded by them as very important.”

  “What I’m working on, sure.” He nodded. “What I’ve been doing with that work lately… forget it.”

  He glanced out the window, then back at her, then did a violent double take. “My God,” he muttered, a spastic chill making him wrench in the chair.

  “What is it?” she asked in alarm.

  He pointed out the window. “Do you… see—?”

  She turned her head. “The Statue of Liberty, you mean?”

  He looked at her with relief and astonishment. “You can see it?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she said with a perplexed smile. “I don’t understand.”

  “Well.” He swallowed dryly. “The last I heard, it was in New York Harbor and considerably bigger.”

  Her smile brightened. “This is a copy given to Paris by the American colony here,” she told him.

  He drew in a tremulous breath and closed his eyes. For a moment there… he thought. He shuddered uncontrollably. “Jesus,” he said.

  “Why did the sight of it shock you so?” she asked, perplexed again.

  “It made me think about reality slippage,” he told her.

  “Oh.” She nodded, understanding. “And about that wager, I imagine; that man.”

  “Veering. Yes, that too.” He managed to force a smile. “Know enough about what I do now?” he asked.

  “All I’ll ever know, I guess,” she said, amused, “since I didn’t understand a word of it.”

  “Except for ‘targets,’” he reminded her.

  Her smile faded. “Except for that,” she said.

  ***

  As they stepped off the boat onto the embarcadère, Chris put his right arm over her shoulders. “In the midst of all this insanity,” he said, “I hope you don’t mind that I’ve fallen in love with you.”

  She didn’t look at him. “You know I don’t mind,” she said. “I feel the same but…” Her voice trailed off.

  “But?”

  She sighed unhappily. “It simply isn’t possible right now.”

  “Why?” he asked. “Just because my life’s a nightmare? Just because people want to replace me or kill me or both?”

  Her laugh was not one of pleasure. “Oh, Chris,” she said. He felt her arm slide firmly around his waist. “I wish it could be.”

  “Can’t we go to your island?”

  She looked at him worriedly. “You won’t mention that to anyone, will you?” she asked.

  “To whom?” he asked, smiling. “Who do I know beside you that isn’t out to get me?”

  “I’m so sorry for what you’re going through,” she told him. “I am going to try and get you out of it. Until that time though…”

  He nodded. “Okay. Until that time. As long as you know I love you. As long as I know you feel the same.”

  They had reached her car now and, turning to him, Alexsandra pressed hard against him, her arms tightly around him. “I feel the same,” she said.

  Her lips moved hungrily to his and, for those seconds, he felt nothing but impassioned joy.

  But then she was whispering, “Just remember. Whatever happens… whatever you find out… I didn’t know I was going to love you.”

  He tried to ask her what she meant but she had abruptly pulled away from him to unlock the car door; before he could speak, she’d gotten inside. A sense of cold anxiety inside him, he walked around the car and, as she unlocked the other door, slid in beside her. “What did you mean by that?” he asked.

  There was a rustling in the backseat. Both of them gasped and jerked around as two dark figures loomed behind them. Suddenly, Chris felt hands grabbing at him and a cloth forced across his mouth and nose, a hideous acrid smell lancing into his nostrils. He tried to pull the cloth away but the man who held it was too strong. Chris caught a glimpse of Alexsandra struggling with the other man, a cloth across her face as well.

  The last thing he heard was her pitiful cry. “No, don’t!”

  Then darkness swallowed him.

  5

  He twisted uncomfortably, clenching his teeth; his neck felt stiff and achy. Damn, he thought and opened his eyes.

  He was still in the car.

  Automatically, he looked toward the other seat, wincing as he stretched his neck muscles.

  Alexsandra was gone.

  What else? he thought with unexpected fury. He twisted around to look at the backseat. Except for his bag, it was empty.

  “Goddamn it!” he raged. Here we fucking go again! Drugged and taken someplace else, drugged and taken someplace else, drugged and taken someplace else! He was sick and tired of it! Sick and tired of being treated like a goddamn puppet!

  He kneaded at the back of his neck, grimacing as he looked around.

  At first, he thought the car was parked in the Bois de Boulogne again. Then his gaze elevated and he saw that there were no buildings anywhere in sight; all he could see were trees and meadows. He was in the country somewhere. Where—in France? he thought bitterly. Or was it Austria, Germany, Switzerland, England again?

  It could be anywhere.

  He rolled down the window and drew in deep breaths, trying to rid his nostrils and throat of the sickening aftertaste; chloroform, no doubt, he thought. But administered by whom? The Middle Easterners? That made no sense. They wanted him dead, didn’t they?

  A third group then?

  “Oh… God!” He pounded a fist down on the seat, hissing at the flare of pain it caused in the back of his neck. Groaning, he kneaded at it with both hands, trying to relax the muscles.

  While he was doing it, he saw two objects on the driver’s seat, one a small box, the other a small cassette player. Now what? he thought angrily. Another goddamn composition to interpret the address of some house hidden in the fucking titles?

  He exhaled heavily. “Well, screw you,” he addressed whoever had put the objects there beside him. He wasn’t going to play this goddamn game anymore, be led around by the nose mentally. No way.

  He got out of the car and paced along the side of the two-lane road. The air was a little chilly, making him shiver. He looked at a small truck as it rattled by. The back of it was loaded with potatoes. Farm country, he thought. He continued pacing, breathing deeply.

  He checked his pockets. The mon
ey was gone, which meant that he couldn’t drive back to Paris—or whatever major city he was near—and try to get an airline ticket to…

  The thought faded. He couldn’t do that anyway, remembering the horrible sound in Alexsandra’s voice as she’d cried, “No, don’t!”

  He had to know where she was, if she was safe.

  With a surrendering groan, he returned to the car and got back in. Picking up the box, he opened it.

  Inside, lying on a crumpled tissue, was Alexsandra’s ring.

  He picked it up and looked at it, abruptly feeling sick as he saw that it couldn’t possibly be a copy—at least not one that she’d had made. It was far too old. He closed his eyes. Why did she have it in her possession? And how could she be in that painting? Would she tell him that was a copy too?

  He opened his eyes and looked at the small cassette player. He didn’t really want to hear what was on it. He wanted to hurl the ring into the meadow the car was parked by, then go home. He was in way over his head, he knew that. He just couldn’t handle it anymore.

  Reaching out, he pressed the Play button.

  “In the glove compartment is an envelope with a train ticket in it,” a man’s voice said. “You will drive in the direction the car is pointed until you reach the next town. There you will park the car at the train station, leaving the keys inside, and board the first train to Lucerne, Switzerland. A man will meet you there. He will take the ring and give you back the woman.”

  Chris started, tensing, as he heard Alexsandra’s voice on the player. “Please do it, Chris,” she said. “I have to tell you—”

  She broke off and there was a sound of scuffling. “Please,” she said.

  There were more sounds as though Alexsandra was being dragged away. A door slammed. Then the man’s voice said, “If you fail to take the ring to Lucerne, the woman will come to considerable harm.” His voice, already harsh, made Chris wince as it added, malignantly, “Don’t doubt it for a moment, Barton.”

  He kept listening but there was no more. He finally reached down and turned off the player.

  Opening the glove-compartment lid, he removed a bulky envelope from inside the compartment. It contained the train ticket, some Swiss currency and a passport.