by Farris, John
They got out and Doremus, guided by the headlights of the Mustang, found the brush in which he had hidden his scooter, wheeled it out. Amy opened the trunk for him and he lifted the scooter inside, then wired the trunk lid to the back bumper. Amy was standing by the side of the road looking at the rise of the gristmill a hundred feet away. The surface of the water beside the wheel glistened in the moonlight, and Doremus could see where he had crashed through the thin dry boards covering an upstairs window.
Amy shuddered. "Spooky place. You had a lot of courage just to walk in, not knowing—"
"As long as we're here I think I'd like to have another look around," Doremus said, and he skidded down the slope to the water's edge, carrying the light he'd borrowed from the Hawkes.
"Leave me here?" Amy said, startled.
Doremus turned and grinned at her. "Come on then. I'd appreciate the company."
Amy was wearing a ribbed pink turtleneck sweater, dark-green ski pants and black boots, so their trek between the thick brush on the slope and the flowing water was no hardship for her. Directly below the gristmill Doremus extended a hand and hauled her up the slippery bank. They stood close together in the moonlight, in silence, studying the entrance. The dirt of the clearing was completely tracked up.
"Where did you fall?" Amy asked, as he showed her. "That far? You might have been killed."
"I started thinking about that an hour ago. My stomach suddenly felt full of ice-cold toads. It was shock, I suppose."
Amy bit her lip. "I'd like to go. I'm awfully tired and—"
"Five minutes more." They walked back to the mill entrance. "I wonder why it had to be gasoline," Doremus mused. "What goes on in his mind? He could have just waited by the door and blown my head off with a shotgun when I came in. And why go to all the trouble to drag Peter out here . . . why make him a part of it?"
"After you fell into the pond they ran, didn't they? Both of them. He—Michael—must have thought you were dead."
"I suppose so." They approached the brush and the woods in front of the mill. "They ran this way, toward the road, and he got rid of the torch and the gas can, and this pistol—apparently he picked it up inside after I dropped it. They were making for the road, but one of the Hawke boys was between them and the road, and Willis had a light. Instead of keeping low and quiet until there was no further danger of being observed, Peter must have become frightened, and so he bolted into the open, into the meadow there. And Willis Hawke caught a glimpse of him as he ran. Apparently Willis never saw Michael at all. Michael, when he could move without being detected, continued on through the woods until he reached the road. Where he'd left his car."
Amy looked at Doremus, her eyes dark caves in the moonlight.
"He drives a car, of course; it's the only way he could get Peter back and forth. So his car was hidden somewhere off the road. Peter, meanwhile, was on the loose. What would you do, if you were Michael?"
"I'd . . . wait for him. Near the car."
"And then if Peter didn't make it back you'd have to go looking for him. Since you'd last seen him on the meadow you'd have to search there, but you couldn't risk being seen yourself. So you'd return to the woods, you'd go to the edge of the meadow and start walking, until you crossed the marsh and reached the Brunell place."
Amy nodded tautly. "Yes."
"And they you'd see Peter, up there on the hill, near the barn, the Brunell Gallery, and know you couldn't take the chance of calling him. You'd have to go and get him, lead him back to the car, then clear out." He walked with Amy to the moonlighted meadow, which was lightly frosted now. They left footprints in the stiffened grass.
"But that's where I went, searching for Peter," Doremus said. "To the Brunell place. Peter must have seen me coming, and . . . Michael undoubtedly saw me too, from the woods. He saw me and realized there was nothing he could do, realized he couldn't get to Peter before I did. So he returned through the woods to the place where he'd put his car. It must have been up the road a-ways, where the sound of an engine turning over would be muffled. And then he—"
"He drove away," Amy finished, too quickly.
Doremus turned off the light and faced her, and they stood ankle deep in the soft glowing meadow, his breath mildly steaming. Amy seemed to have stopped breathing, but her body was racked, she trembled from the cold and something more; there were tear tracks on her cheeks, like poured silver. "I don't think so," Doremus said. "He drove only as far as the Brunell place. And it wasn't anybody named Michael."
"God," Amy's voice broke. "God, God, no, don't, stop, you hear, Doremus? I won't listen!"
"That was a good summation you made at the school, Amy. You put together what we knew, and what we suspected, and what we hoped was true, you put it all together beautifully and it sounded good. But it wasn't the whole truth, because the truth is even more frightening, more grotesque. We have to let it out though, Amy. We have to let the truth breathe."
"No, no, it couldn't be!"
"There's no Michael Young living in The Shades now, plotting and killing in memory of his dear mother. Michael Young did die in that blizzard, and his ghost rests. There is no Michael Young. He does not live. Despite all of Craig's sick efforts to bring him back to life in the person of Peter Mathis."
He was prepared for almost any reaction but violence. Amy launched herself at him, fists flailing, landing blows on his forehead, shoulders, chest. She hadn't the breath for screaming, but the sounds in her throat were worse than screaming. Doremus tried to tie up her arms and she butted him under the chin with her head, knocking him down. She came stomping with her boots, like a man, breath rasping, the odd squealing noise rising and falling in her throat like the notes of an idiot's whistle. He decided she had to be fought as a man even as he was rolling out from under her boots. He blocked a kick at his throat, grabbed an ankle, twisted hard. Amy fell heavily but the crusty, deep meadow grass softened the fall. She sat up determinedly, legs threshing, one clawlike hand raking toward his face. He pushed the hand aside and slapped her roughly. Amy's head whipped around and there was a startled gleam in one black eye, but her mouth was set in a savage line. Doremus belted her again and she dropped both arms and her head sank, blonde hair spilling over the front of her sweater.
A cry of agony burst from Amy's throat. Her chest heaved. Even as he stood over her, ready to hit her again, Doremus could not help feeling a twinge of lust. He was grimly amused: it had been many months since he'd felt any sort of sexual desire at all. Then tenderness swept over him, and pity. He reached down, grasped an elbow, sought to lift her to her feet. She came halfway, eyes closed. Her throat muscles worked convulsively. Doremus let go and she turned around and threw up with as much violence as she had put into assaulting him.
He left Amy there and went down by the millrace, tore the shirt the sculptor had given him and returned to the meadow, where Amy now lay stretched out on her face. He kneeled beside her, turned her over, wiped her puffed face with the wet piece of shirt. She flinched and tried to pull away.
"I want to die," she groaned.
Doremus studied her face intently, and the things he had noticed all along about this girl suddenly hit him with a curious impact: the high lift of cheekbones, elegant and roguish curve of nose, firm chin, unusual length and thickness of eyelashes. Goddam pity, he observed, holding her, wondering how much she'd loved Craig. She'd made a good try at protecting him, even though the truth must have been eating her insides at the time. He'd had a few things to go on, Doremus thought, but how had Amy known so quickly, how had she been sure? Intuition? Lovely, he thought, with a lingering sadness. All the looks in the world and brainy too, and now how am I supposed to get you through the next few minutes?
He took a deep breath and stood. She lay boneless in the crushed meadow, weakly gasping. He bent over and flicked the wet cloth across her face, stinging her.
"Get up," he said. "I'm not going to carry you. You're big enough to walk." When Amy didn't obey immediately he hit h
er again with the lash of the cloth. Her eyes popped open. She glared up at him. Even by moonlight he could see the reddening cheek, the thin welt. She put a hand to her injured cheek.
"You didn't have to do that!"
"On your feet."
Amy sat up, then with an effort made it to her feet. Doremus looked dispassionately at her. She said, in a voice thick with anger, "I think you're the most loathsome man I've met in my life. I mean it. I didn't like you from the first day I met you. You're arrogant and cold and boorish. I just wanted you to know that." She walked off briskly, down the slope of the meadow to the clearing in front of the mill. There she stopped, uncertainly, touched her cheek again, and began sobbing, swaying on her feet. She cried like an abused and misunderstood child.
He went down there and took her by the elbow and guided her slowly and tenderly along the creek, to the car, and she cried all the way. When they were inside the car she threw her arms around him and held him tightly, and buried her frozen face in the lambskin lining of Willis Hawke's new jacket. Doremus let her go until there were no more tears, just excruciating dry sobs. The sky in the east seemed to be graying. It had been a long night. He felt incredibly tired, sitting there, and his head ached. And he knew it was still a long, long way from being over.
"He must be . . . so terribly sick. I don't know why . . . I didn't see it sooner. All these months. So evasive, so preoccupied. How long was he carrying all that around in his mind? Oh, God, God, God, what can I do, how can I help him?"
"It's important to remember this, Amy. He is sick. And he's extremely dangerous. He's more dangerous at this moment than he's ever been, because he must realize we're getting close to him."
She pulled away, saying, in a horrified tone, "Peter!"
"Peter's safe with Craig; in fact Peter may be the only one who's safe with him just now."
"What about all he's made Peter go through in the past few weeks? Climbing over the roofs of the school . . . he could have been killed at any time. What has Peter had to do with Andy's death, and Hap's? Doremus, there's so much I don't understand!"
"I suppose the whole thing began with Peter, because he does strongly resemble Michael Young, and he's about the same age Michael was when he wandered off into that storm. And temperamentally, as far as I know, Peter is very much like Michael. So there was Craig, the clinical psychologist, trying to help Peter, trying to get behind the wall of anger and hurt and hostility that kept Peter mute, becoming more and more involved with him, with his problems, with the mother who had died. Maybe that was what ultimately got to Craig—the trauma of the mother who was torn away, suddenly made dead."
"Why?" Amy cried.
"We've heard time and again how much Michael loved his mother. We've heard how he rebelled against everybody when she died, retreated into himself, tried over and over to escape, to run away. But what do we know about Craig's reactions? How did he take his mother's death? Was he unaffected? I doubt it. I think he was as hurt
and angered and resentful as his brother; but, emotionally, they weren't alike. Craig seems to have been the kind to button his lip, keep things to himself, never, never show his emotions. Besides, he had an extra burden, his little brother. He must have felt responsible for Mike because they were alone, in the care of an aunt whom they didn't know, whom they undoubtedly disliked and mistrusted at first. It was the world against the Youngs, and Craig felt bound to protect Michael at all costs. You can imagine how Michael's death hit him—when he failed in his trust."
Amy was sitting up now, her face stiff, listening. She moistened her lips with her tongue. "He must have felt . . . guilty. Intensely, morbidly guilty."
"I would say so. And as he grew older the pressure of that guilt became too intense for him; it had to produce a few cracks in the psyche, give reality some odd twists. He had to be suffering. What happens to the individual who lives so long with guilt, keeping his emotions properly under control all the time?"
Amy was silent for a while, and then she said haltingly, "He can . . . destroy himself. Or he can shift the burden, make others carry part of it for him."
"Others, like Helen Connelly. Or Andrew Britton. Hap Washbrook."
"Doremus . . . what made you suspect it had to be Craig?"
"I began speculating when I saw how dependent on Craig Peter was. Also, an interesting thing happened in the barn while I was trying to corner Peter. I inadvertently started a bell tolling, and after it tolled ten, maybe a dozen times, Peter nearly jumped out of his skin, like a . . . a sleepwalker waking, and he seemed to have no awareness of where he was. The shock almost caused him a bad fall. Later, when I heard the bell at the Greenleaf School, which has a similar tone, it occurred to me that Peter might have been under hypnosis all the time I was chasing him—that he'd been cued to wake up, in his own room, at a certain hour, by the tollings of the school bell. By 'wake up' I mean from induced sleep. Then Craig mentioned he'd been using hypnosis as a part of Peter's therapy. I had already come up with the idea that Peter was getting out of his room at night by leaping like a tender young mountain goat over the rooftops of the school, and then I knew how it could be possible. He was doing it under deep hypnosis. Craig had been controlling almost every move Peter made until Peter blundered away from him tonight."
"Something like that occurred to me. If Peter was leaving the school at will, then someone had to be helping him. Someone who could drive in and out of the school grounds at all hours, without being challenged or remembered: a familiar face. When I made myself accept that I knew it all, because . . ." she hesitated, weakening, and leaned toward him again. Doremus held her, lightly, the crown of her head tucked under his chin. "Upstairs in the infirmary, while Peter was in a frenzy, Craig almost broke down. No. He did break down. I was in the outer room, the dispensary, trying to locate an ampul of meprobamate. The nurse is an old girl who can't see a foot without her glasses and Peter was upsetting her. Anyway, when I found the ampul I let her prepare the injection and went back to Craig. He was sitting on the bed holding Peter tightly in his arms and at first I thought there must be another boy with them, in the shadows somewhere, because I heard this voice saying, 'Don't, Michael . . . you're not lost, you're not lost . . .' This . . . little boy's voice. But the whole room was empty, only the three of us were there. It was Craig. And that voice . . . I'd heard it before. Just the other morning, on the telephone. Craig hadn't been gone from my bed thirty minutes when . . . that voice, that same voice. Said he was Michael. Said he hated Craig." She tensed in his arms; Doremus held her tighter. "Oh, God," she whimpered. "I'm so scared!"
"What happened after you heard him talking to Peter, calling him Michael?"
"He became aware of me, he saw my shadow or something, and turned around and said in his own voice, 'What's taking her so damned long?' Then the nurse hurried in and we gave Peter the tranquilizer, quite a lot of it, and I retreated. I wasn't going to think about it, what I heard, I wasn't. I willed myself not to. It was like being sliced deep with a very sharp knife. The blood comes a little later. I'm sorry I hit you, Doremus. It was my last chance, my very last chance to keep from drowning in my blood." One of her hands was limp against his leg. He felt her breath on his throat, and he smiled unconsciously, comfortingly.
"But why is he using Peter like that? Why does he insist Peter is Michael? He knows better. Doesn't he? How can he know it one minute, and not the next?"
"You've seen him go from an irrational to a rational state of mind in the blink of an eye. I don't know why it happens either, but . . . look at it this way: he's a man balancing a massive stone on his head, struggling down a long straight road. One instant that road is black as night and filled with terrible things, and two steps later the sun is beating down on the road, on him. Maybe he thinks about it, out there in the sun, maybe he remembers the terrors. He would like to stop and think it all over carefully, but he knows he can't stop, even for a moment, because the weight he is carrying will surely crush him if he does. I've met m
any psychotics in my former profession, I've talked to psychiatrists about them. They reach a desperation point, where any mild stimulus can drive them into the dark forever, where the nightmares never stop. You know that, Amy, it's your line of work. It isn't a pleasant thing to think about, because legally there's no way to touch Craig, not a shred of evidence against him. He should be locked up. But we can't do it."
"What are we going to do, then? We have to get Peter away from Craig."
"As I said before, I believe Peter's safe for now, since Craig's psychosis largely depends on him. No telling what damage Craig has done to Peter, psychologically speaking. Maybe a good psychiatrist will be able to straighten Peter out once this is over."
"But what are we going to do?" Amy said urgently.
"Talk some more, Amy. At your place, I hope. I should make a telephone call right away. Then . . . I'm going to need your help, a lot of help. It's necessary to prove without doubt that Craig is insane and capable of murder. That won't be easy, and we probably don't have very much time."
Chapter 15
Helen woke up at seven thirty, earlier than Peggy for once. Her daughter slept beside her, on her stomach, small hands clutching the plump pillow. She didn't come so often anymore, stumbling from her own room in the dark, burrowing soundlessly under the warm covers of Helen's bed, but it always gave Helen a glow of pleasure—as well as a taste of sadness—to wake up and find Peg there. She was growing fast, too fast, Helen thought, rearranging the bedding so Peg would keep warm.
It was a clear, still cold morning. There was frost on the layer of yellow and ocher leaves in the backyard. Helen put on the best robe she had, the one that was pure extravagance, with yards of lace at the cuffs and down the front. She went downstairs, and was surprised to see the door of the office standing wide. She missed the morning effluvium of stale cigar smoke. She looked in. Apparently Doremus had come and gone, with all his belongings. The blankets and the pillow he had used were in the middle of the rusty-looking horsehair sofa. On top there was a scrawled note, the pale yellow rectangle of a telegram. She picked up the note.