Barry Hughes was shaking his head. “No, no, please don’t insult my intelligence, Mrs. Rader. And I won’t insult yours. What I say, you can depend on, it’ll be true. But let me give you one word of advice—don’t start with the you-need-help crap, okay? You think I’m nuts? Of course I need help—maybe not as bad as you need help, but I need it. Right? But I begin to go crazy when people start insulting my intelligence—Brad Nichols gave me that and I didn’t take kindly to it, get it? By the time I was finished with old Brad—well, why bring that up?” He smiled disarmingly. “Not one of my prouder accomplishments. You listening?”
“Yes, I’m listening.”
“Are you scared?”
“What are you talking about? Of course I’m scared!”
“That’s good, that’s the spirit. I may be a class-A psycho or I may not, neither you nor I are really qualified to decide that … but I really don’t want to wind up in a rubber room somewhere. So you and I had better come up with some alternatives. That is, if you want my opinion.”
He poured himself another cup and went back to leaning against the mantelpiece. There were sweat stains spreading from his armpits and his forehead was gleaming. His voice stayed very calm. “While you were unconscious from your fall, I picked up the telephone just to see if it was working—it’s not. No pizza for us tonight.” He flashed a weird, crooked smile at her. “I turned on the radio and heard an interesting bit of news—a police motor launch just came apart out there when it ran into the Staten Island ferry. Can you believe that? They’re picking bodies out of the water now—what’s the matter? You look funny—”
“No, nothing funny, just a terrible accident—”
“Yeah. Terrible. My heart goes out to them. Anyway, the bridge is blocked, too. Or did Dr. Drummond tell you that? Seems to me he did.” He chuckled at his witticism.
He rattled on, talking to himself. Natalie wondered if MacPherson had wound up in the water. How many motor launches could the cops have out there tonight? But that still left the Staten Island police. … My God, where were they? It seemed hours since she’d talked with MacPherson. He was going to call them right away—
“You really didn’t know it was me, did you? The deliveryman and D’Allessandro?”
“No, I didn’t. Your Dr. Drummond was especially brilliant.” Keep him talking, she thought, ask him questions. “But how did you know about him?”
“Nothing to it,” he said smugly. “I was following you, you must have looked right at me a hundred times, but I kept changing who I was. I was fascinated by you, the way a man can be fascinated by a beautiful woman who holds his fate in her hands. I thought maybe you could identify me. Maybe. But I also felt there was something between us, a relationship between you and me, Natalie. I read about you, I followed you, I watched you walk … I wanted to know more about you. I wanted to know everything about you. Everything. Body and soul, as they say. You have a really snotty look, arrogant, you know that? You literally have your nose in the air and I thought about you all the time, all kinds of things.” He giggled almost shyly. “I wondered what it would be like to kiss your naked belly and pull your panties down and spread you open and look inside, all that stuff … but I wanted to talk with you, too, and find out if you were, like afraid. …”He grinned at her, a half-smile playing across his small mouth. “Watching you and the cop buying the Christmas tree I wondered how often you fingerfuck yourself, how long it had been since you’d screwed and if you were going to fuck the cop. … Christ, it made me so hard I couldn’t believe it. But the last thing I wanted to do was hurt you … I don’t know what I wanted to do, it was a game, I wanted to know about you—that’s it, I just wanted to know everything. One day I followed you to the Algonquin, you were meeting this guy for a drink and I came in with a copy of Variety and sat down near you, near enough to hear your conversation. That’s how I heard about Drummond, so I called you. If you’d already talked to Drummond, then I was just a voice at the end of a telephone and you couldn’t find me. … And if you hadn’t called him, then I could become Drummond for you, get closer and closer. I mean, it really was like a movie, I was right in the middle of a scary movie, it reminded me of Flesh and Fantasy, the Edward G. Robinson segment where the fortune-teller Podgers, Thomas Mitchell it was, tells him he’s going to kill somebody and Robinson can’t believe it; what I was doing had that same feel, black and white, lots of texture, a helluva movie, y’know? I was the innocent guy driven to shoot that little whore Quirk but I did it, I got up my courage and rid the world of the rotten bitch, she wouldn’t pay me for doing a fuck movie with her, I should be a hero, but then—by crazy chance—somebody who’s totally uninvolved sees me throw the gun away … and the story gets in the paper … and then the weird fear starts working on me, can she recognize me? I don’t know what I was going to do, I didn’t have a plan, now I never will know—and it’s all that asshole Brad’s fault, he had to stick his nose and more particularly his cock into things—I mean Jesus you were mine and he got you down on the floor and you fucked him and he had to write all that shit down in his diary. I mean I saw red, he’s coming on all tough and shape-up-Barry to me and I’ve just read his diary all about what it was like to push it into you, how soft and wet you are, and poor old Brad was a dead man, dead, dead, dead … and I knew I had to have you myself. I mean, if you’d do it with him, you were bound to do it with me, made sense, right?” He seemed to become aware of her for the first time in his monologue and shouted at her, “Right? You’d do it with me, too, right?”
“I don’t know. Barry. He made it up. I didn’t do it with him, truly I didn’t—”
“I told you, I warned you, don’t insult my intelligence! You fucked him!” Then he calmed down. “Well, we’ll get to that in a little while. I’m not sure what movie all this is from—I have a little trouble with movies and real life. Actor, you know. I’m an actor. I get by. Not enough projection, voice, I mean, but I get by, sing a little, dance a little, used to juggle—anyway, fuck all that. Like they say, Actors Equity, where are you when I need you? Does my agent get ten percent of this load of trouble? Ha! I’m finally in the movies and you and I are the only ones who know. So the big question is, how does this end? Is it a night at the movies? Or is it real life? Do I go up the river and say goodbye to Pat O’Brien before I walk the last mile? Or maybe it’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest … or Night Must Fall. … Are we Tony Perkins and Janet Leigh or are we Barry Hughes and Natalie Rader?”
He was loving the sound of his own voice and she listened, forcing the images of the gutted woman upstairs, the mangled cats out of her mind, concentrating on Barry, listening, waiting for anything she could use, get hold of.
He was relaxed. He feels safe, she thought, he knows we’re alone and going to stay that way. He kept talking, rattling on about his parents and how he’d always wanted to be an actor, on and on. A character actor, he said, a faceless man. “I can be anyone, Natalie, the invisible man.” He went to the coffee table, knelt, and poured himself another steaming cup, poured one for her, held it out to her.
“Here, Natalie, it’s really very good—”
With all the strength in her legs she suddenly slammed the coffee table toward him, felt it hit his chest, straightened her legs, pushing with all the force in her hips and thighs, saw the moment disintegrate into its components: the gleaming silver pot tilting toward him, the cup he was holding flying into the air and the steaming liquid hanging in the air, then falling across his face like a whip. She heard him scream, sprawling on his back with the table and the tray of cups and saucers and the pot littering him. He was rubbing at his face and she was on her feet, leaping past him and putting the couch between them, stupidly stopping to look back and see him thrashing about on the floor. While she watched he slowly stopped moving, lay quietly, breathing deeply like a man utterly exhausted. He was staring at the ceiling.
“That was a very predatory act,” he said between gasps. He was wiping his sleeve back an
d forth across his eyes, wiping away the hot chocolate. There were red streaks across his flesh and on his balding head. A cut above his eye was bleeding. “So, I guess it’s going to be a movie, Natalie. So what do you do now in this movie, Natalie? Let’s see, let’s think it through. I’m going to have to do something just plain god-awful to you when I catch you. … So, I’d say you’d better get a move on, Natalie!”
His voice had risen to a shriek on the last few words and suddenly he was horribly alive, like a flashing, thrusting reptile, throwing aside the coffee table and slipping and getting to his feet. …
Adrenaline fueled her instincts. She had no sense of what she was doing, she was moving as fast as she could but it seemed like slow motion.
She was in the hallway.
She heard him knock over another piece of furniture.
She was out the front door and across the porch.
She was in the clutches of the storm.
Chapter Twenty-six
FOR A MOMENT THE storm’s impact hit her like a hammer and she reeled backward, feet and ankles plunging painfully through the snowcrust, falling to her knees, blinded by the blowing snow. Her mind was clicking, telling her to hide, don’t try to run in this, you’ll never make it … hide, don’t let him get you. …
She struggled back to her feet and plunged off toward the barn, which would be dark and sheltered from the wind. She’d been there before, she knew it better than he did, somehow she could hide there. She needed to get away and she couldn’t take time to think … she heard him stomping out onto the porch, heard the wind slam the door back on its hinges.
As she lost breath the sound of the night roared in her ears, she felt sweat and panic breaking out, felt her legs weaken each time they sank through the crust.
The barn loomed out of the darkness. Maybe he wouldn’t know where she’d gone, it was too dark and the wind too loud for him actually to see or hear her flailing away. She began to feel faint from lack of oxygen and stopped, desperately sucking at the wind. She looked back, trying to see him, thought she saw his shape thrashing through the snow … what she could see was the black, twisting trail she had left behind her, a black scar stretching from him inevitably to her. …
Then she heard him scream unintelligibly, heard the cry cut off as if he had fallen in the snow, but it wasn’t a human sound. It was the sound of the instrument of her own death and she gulped, struggled on, ripping her ankles on the frozen snow.
She reached the door to the barn, the same door she’d gone in before, only a few hours ago, and she pushed it open, went inside. Suddenly the sound seemed far away, the wind was reduced to the whining and the draft through the chinks in the walls, and it wasn’t so cold. She stood quietly, willing her eyes to accustom themselves to the darkness. Don’t turn on that light, Natalie, just find a hiding place, get out of the way … feel around for a weapon, a rake, a shovel, anything.
Instead she tripped over some piece of Tony’s apparatus, fell heavily, scraping her hand. She forced herself back to her feet, felt her way slowly toward the narrow stairway she had climbed before, banged into something else in her path, finally reached the bottom step; grabbed on to the handrail, and began climbing past the sacks and boxes and cans stacked on the steps.
The door was ripped open and the night came in again, the wind and the roar like a hungry beast.
“Natalie!” He sounded as if he were speaking in tongues, a different voice, a deep cry from the pit. “Natalie! I’m here! I’ve come to get you. …”
She crouched halfway up the stairs, afraid to move or make a sound. Her mouth was dry and her heartbeat was out of control.
She heard him close the door, sealing them off, heard him stumbling around, muttering. She lay quietly trying to remember what she had seen on the second floor, the balcony where Tony stored his stained glass … there were frames of all sizes, long pieces of wood, shreds of soldering material scattered across the floor like droppings, half-finished sheets of stained glass, several huge completed works, boxes and crates and nondescript bags. …
The dim light suddenly came on and she saw him standing in the doorway, still wearing his gray suit, which was dusted with snow and hung loosely now that he’d removed the padding from his torso. His face was deathly pale, his eyes flickered around the barn like searchlights tilting and out of control.
She could make herself no smaller and even in the dim light with the shadows and the gloom he saw her. He saw her and he smiled.
“Natalie. There you are. Just wait right there, right where you are, Natalie.” He pointed his finger like a schoolteacher warning a difficult student. The burn across his face had bubbled, looked like a parasitic slug clinging to him, eating his flesh.
She was frozen to the spot, trapped.
He began looking around him, making an inventory of materials. He glanced up at her every few seconds, smiling, nodding his head. “Don’t be impatient with me, Natalie.” He laughed to himself. “Let’s take our time with this. …”
On a workbench he found what he wanted but she couldn’t make it out. He was tinkering with it, looking at it.
Suddenly a dart of flame appeared in the darkness; he held it up, admired it. An acetylene torch. One of Tony’s pieces of apparatus, something he used. He admired the flame from all angles, the orange and yellow and blue, adjusted it, stretching the tongue of flame.
“All right, Natalie. Here I come. It’s time, Natalie.”
Holding the angry, fiery needle before him, he began advancing toward the bottom of the stairway. She felt the tremor as he stood on the first step, grinning up at her. He was only fifteen feet below her and frantically she turned, raced to the top of the stairs. Grinning, he plodded on.
All she could find to save herself were the exquisite pieces of stained glass.
She tipped a large frame over and heaved it down the stairway.
Surprised, he stepped aside, kicked at it, shattered it, sending it exploding into the darkness beneath the stairs.
She hurled down another and he stopped, fended it off, the grin remaining in place. He came on. Another plunged toward him and he kicked it away, laughing. Huge pieces of stained glass, crimson and green and yellow, broke off and splintered, raining into the barn below.
He came on, the flame darting like a snakes tongue.
Feeling behind her, she found the immense frame, a piece of antique wood, and she tugged it forward, straining, breaking fingernails to slide it across the uneven wooden floorboards. He was halfway up the stairs now, his face like a mask of laughter, laughter at her helplessness, at this lone woman without protection.
With the last reserves of strength she leaned into the frame, pushing with her shoulder, and sent it spinning and toppling off the top stair. So large that for a moment it blocked her view, it teetered, crashed into the wall, and then slowly seemed to split in two, snapping like a giant slab of ice, and she could see him again throwing one arm up to shield himself from its erratic trajectory. But he had brought his free arm up too high and a jagged splinter of dull yellow glass, like a sword, glanced off the wall and drove underneath his arm and entered his chest, between the flaps of the suit jacket, entered through his shirt and drove him back like a fist. …
He stood still, leaning back against the wall, the smile slowly fading as he looked down at his chest as if he wasn’t quite understanding what had happened. He tried to pull himself together, took a step away from the wall, then another, and then the pain and the weight of the glass that had impaled him began to tear at him. He clutched at his chest as Natalie watched, her hand to her mouth to stop the screaming. …
He looked at her again, his eyes rolling back, and grabbed at the great glass pillar implanted in his chest and turned the torch on himself. Instantaneously it burned his chest black and he cried out; stumbled, fell backward, tumbling down the stairs, crashing face down, driving the glass clear through him, the point ripping open the back of his coat. He lay twitching, lying on top of
the torch, and as she crouched, rocking on her heels, clutching her arms around her knees, she realized she was smelling the burning of his flesh … his body was smoking. …
She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.
Natalie didn’t move for a long time.
The wind and the storm seemed far away.
All the fear seemed somehow as if it had never quite happened to her. Pure fantasy. A bad dream. A story to be told late at night.
She tried to remember the night it had begun, the man throwing the gun, the laughter in the hallway outside her door.
She remembered all the men who had played their parts in the story of the last two weeks, all the men in her life who had been passing through and had been concerned, for her, for themselves, all the men who had wanted something from her, had hoped for something from her, who had tried to help her while helping themselves … all the decent men and those who weren’t so decent. …
Tony, who would soon be gone.
Jay, whose past held such awful secrets and who would never change.
Lew Goldstein, who had worried and tried to help.
Rory Linehan, sniveling and weak and drunk and sad. …
Bradley Nichols, who had run afoul of fate.
Dr. Drummond, who hadn’t been Dr. Drummond at all.
Barry Hughes …
And MacPherson. Who had tried to make her Christmas bright.
She wiped her eyes at last and stood up, waited until her legs stopped shaking.
Slowly, like a very careful child, she descended the stairway toward the body of Barry Hughes. There was no way past him. She stopped near the bottom, unable for a moment to step across him. What if he weren’t dead yet …
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