One each at his elbows.
He smashed the mirror with his fist, took the sharpest, biggest piece of broken glass, and thrust it into his throat.
He died gurgling on his own blood.
Chapter 50
“You blasted idiot, Anton. What the hell made you do a thing like that!” Ernie was fuming, absolutely incensed at what the man had done to Betty. That poor woman was upstairs in tears, and all because Suffron didn’t have the sensitivity of a petrified dog turd.
Anton was back at the makeshift bar, opening another bottle of gin. “Oh will you shut up!” the pianist snapped. “I am tired of you, tired of your self-righteous attitude, your insistence on running to the aid of defenseless females. I am sick of the whole lot of you. Sick and tired—”
Ernie turned away, tuning out. There was no reasoning with Anton now. His drunkenness had gone beyond mere theatricality; he was now completely inebriated. The fact that the man was still on his feet was testament to his amazing constitution; most people would have passed out by now. Anton was running on pure nervous energy.
“I refuse to buckle under in this, our hour of need,” Anton ranted. “They’re all gone. They’re all dead. All accept you and me. Well, I SHALL NOT DIE, I TELL YOU. I am immortal, a genius. I cannot die. In a few minutes,” he said, “after I fortify myself with a few more martinis, I shall march out that door to meet my maker. And I will spit in his eye.”
“Quiet down, Anton. I think somebody’s calling from the servants’ quarters.”
“To hell with them. They’re servants, aren’t they? Let them come here and serve us. I will not run at the beckoning of the little people.” He drained his glass, started fixing another cocktail. “I shall march out that door, wander through the night as I’m supposed to do in that damnable book of yours—”
“It’s not my book.”
“—and I will defy the gods. I will not try to escape the fate in store for me. And you know why? Because I think it’s all a crock. Nothing’s going to happen. There’s an explanation for everything. Everything. I don’t believe it. Not a word of it. Not anymore. I’m going to walk out that door—and nothing’s going to happen to me.”
Ernie could have sworn there was some commotion in the other part of the house, but Anton was talking so loudly … Well, whatever it was, he was sure Hans would have everything under control. It sounded as if someone was banging on the wall in here, yelling.
“Anton, will you shut—”
“Not a damn thing is going to happen.”
Forgetting the noises he’d heard, Ernie decided to torment his companion. “Tell me something, Anton. Just what is it that’s supposed to happen to you, hmmm? Why don’t you tell me just what you read in that book?”
Anton glared at him stupidly. “No.” He was a petulant youngster now. “No. And you can’t make me. I won’t tell you.”
“Now, it can’t be all that bad.”
“No. You already tried to make me tell you once tonight. When I was—”
“Crying? Yes. I remember that.”
“When I was upset. You tried to get me to tell you. I didn’t then and I won’t now.”
“It must have been something pretty awful.”
Ernie could see Anton thinking about it, and he was glad the man was being disturbed, becoming frightened again. He had that certain look in his eyes. For a second Ernie thought Anton would be scared back into sobriety. Then the look faded, the bad thoughts were tucked away, and Anton lifted his glass and began drinking.
“You miserable, disgusting drunk,” Ernie said.
The door to his room opened; Ernie heard footsteps. Andrea appeared, taut and pale, but otherwise refreshed.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes. What was all the racket out here?”
“Anton. Anton inhaling martinis and exhaling his nasty temperament on me and Betty.”
Andrea cocked her head querulously at the sound of the woman’s name. Ernie explained. “She’s up in her room now, in tears. Seems she thought that Anton cared for her, as if Anton could possibly care for anyone but himself. Well, he made sure that she knew what the story was, in the coldest, cruelest way possible.”
“You really stink, Anton, you know that?” Andrea moved towards the bar. “Is there any liquor left?”
“Maybe a little. Better hurry before Anton gets it.”
Andrea poured some scotch in a glass and drank it straight. “He didn’t tell her about the book, did he?”
“I prevented that. No need to frighten her anymore than she already is.” He moved close to the woman and spoke softly. “What are we going to do?”
Andrea held her drink in both hands as if warming the liquid. “We’re going to sit tight. Stay inside this house, and hope that nothing else happens. In the morning, in the daylight, we’ll look for the others. If we can’t find them, we’ll leave. One way or another. If we have to build a raft.”
“Yes. I guess that’s all we can do. Did you get —a fix—on the book?” He hoped she hadn’t; he’d had his fill of that awful manuscript.
Before she could answer the front door was opened and Lynn Overman was standing in the foyer.
“Thank God,” Andrea said, closing her eyes. She opened her eyes and moved towards her friend. “Thank God you’re all right.”
Ernie was about to speak, to apologize for not accompanying the woman, when Anton began to giggle dementedly like a psychotic five-year-old. ”Hahahahahah heeee. There—she proves it. Our hostess has gone out into the night, the terrible dark night on this horrible old island, and returned. Returned! Safe and sound. So much for your stupid book, and Andrea’s silly theories. There’s no danger. There never was any danger. Lynn, my darling, come to me. Come have a martini with your boy, your own boy, and tell us how you escaped so narrowly from the very jaws of death.” When she showed no signs of moving towards him, the pianist got to his feet and began a shaky journey across the room. “Give us a kiss, my dear.” His thick lips made obscene kissing noises. “A kiss and all will be well with the world. One kiss, my darling.”
Lynn moved aside before Anton could reach her. “Stop it, Anton. I’m not in the mood for your childish behavior. Besides—” She paused, took off her jacket, flung it over the back of the sofa. “I’m not so sure that Andrea’s theories are silly. I’m not so sure we’re not in danger. In fact, I’ve become convinced that we are.”
Ernie jumped in before anyone could interrupt him. “What did you find? What did you see out there? What changed your mind?”
Lynn walked over to the fireplace and stood there, facing the other three like a senator about to take questions from the press. “Nothing changed my mind. I didn’t find John. I don’t know what’s become of him. But I suspect—well, you’ve read the book. I haven’t. I should have, but I didn’t want to. I might as well come clean with all of you.
“I know where the book came from.”
The others could only stand there and stare at her.
It all poured out of her, and she was glad that she had decided to tell them what had happened. Anton was skeptical as always, but Ernie, and especially Andrea, seemed to accept what she said right from the first. She told them about how she’d cast a spell, that horrible spell, so she could peek into the future, her future. All because she had been dumped by yet another man, all because she had been lonely and wicked and foolish.
“When I got back from the restaurant,” she said, “I was in such despair. So confused. I didn’t want to go on. I thought of calling you, Andrea— but you were out of town, with that fellow you were seeing. Even if you had been in Boston I wouldn’t have called. I didn’t want to mess up your happiness with my misery.”
Andrea frowned. “What are friends for, Lynn? Besides, I broke up with that fellow two weeks later.” She smiled at Ernie. “He was a little too dull for my tastes.”
“Anyway,” Lynn continued, “I decided to go ahead with something I’d thought about a long time,
ever since I came across it in an old book. It would only work if you had some special, intrinsic power of your own, and I know now that I do, although I was never and will never be as powerful as you, Andrea.”
The psychic smiled sadly. “Consider yourself lucky.”
“I remembered thinking: what if I wake up-after casting the spell—and there’s nothing there, just blankness, or the room has been transformed, taken over by somebody else? Would it mean that I had moved out during the year to come, or that I had died? I was so afraid. But nothing could have stopped me.”
“What were you hoping to see?” Ernie asked quietly.
“Something, anything, some sign that my life was better, happier. Maybe I just wanted to see a man’s clothes in the closet, a man who really loved me lying on the bed. I know that’s silly, pre-feminist thinking, but I’ve been so lonely all my life. Maybe I just wanted to see some sign that my life was a little more interesting than before. Working in an office all these years, I get so scared. Wondering what will become of me. I know we’re supposed to be lucky, those of us who are young, but I think of the future and instead of seeing glorious possibilities, unlimited chances for happiness, I just see years and years of misery instead. Stretching endlessly. One day I’ll be old and what was it for? Who will care? Who will love me? Why bother?”
“We all feel that way sometimes,” Ernie said. “All of us.”
“Do we? Does everyone feel that way? Not everyone, I think. But I wasn’t content with just waiting to see what happened. I wanted to look a year into the future. The spell wouldn’t take me to wherever I might be a year hence, but would move me forward in time—temporarily—while I remained in the same location. I never dreamed it would actually work. But it did.”
“And the book?” Andrea asked. “What about the book?”
Lynn clasped her hands together, and sighed, wondering where to begin. “The book. The book … is my punishment.”
“Punishment? For what?”
“For doing what I did, Andrea. For moving through the barriers of time. For daring to break through the cosmic wall that separates one second from another. I did it, you know. I really did. And for everything, there is a price.”
“Nonsense,” Anton muttered. “You never left your room and you never left your time, you silly twit. You got up, saw nothing, and went back to sleep. Only an idiot like you would think she had traveled to the future. Lord.”
“Oh shut up, Anton. I don’t care if you believe me or not. But you wanted to know where that impossible novel came from and I’m telling you. I brought it back with me from one year—now about six months—in the future. It was there on the night table, whether you believe it or not.”
Ernie shook his head and tried to understand. “Are you sure, Lynn? I’m trying so hard to accept this, to comprehend it, and if Andrea says it’s possible, I guess it is. But you said you didn’t get a good look at the book. How do we know it’s the same one?”
“Once I returned to my own time,” Lynn said with infinite patience, “I realized that I was still holding the book. I looked at it. Late at Night, a suspense story, a horror novel. I was freaked out, because I knew I had never bought that book, knew it hadn’t been on the night table before. Such irony. A whole year would go by and the only significant thing I would do is pick up another paperback novel. I’m ravenous, you know. I read all those horror things, suspense stories, mysteries. It looked just like the sort of thing I would buy. But I didn’t read it, didn’t even read the cover copy, or anything inside. It frightened me. It was out of its place, that book, out of the scheme of things.”
“You never went through it, never read a word?”
“No. Imagine what I would have done if I had, if I had discovered it was a novel about here, about us … if what you say is true. I’m glad I didn’t read it. I was going to hide it, lock it up, but I was hoping that it would just disappear, y’know, go back to its own time, while I was out, or sleeping or something. I didn’t want to hide it away for some reason. I just slipped it in the bookshelf with the rest of my trashy paperbacks. I hoped one afternoon I’d look and it would be gone.”
“Then how did it get here?” Andrea wanted to know.
“John came to my apartment one evening—funny, I did have a new man in my life, but John wasn’t the type to sleep over, to leave his things there. Anyway, he came to take me out to dinner, help me pack up for the weekend. I had bought some new books, put them on my shelf with the others. I asked John to pack them for me, and he did, only he took about twenty novels instead of the six I’d bought, put them all in my little suitcase. When we got here—I saw that Late at Night was one of them. I didn’t want it in the room with me, but I didn’t want it to be … alone, I guess. I took the whole pile of books and put them on the bookshelf over there.”
“Where I found it,” Ernie said.
“And read it,” Andrea finished.
“It’s almost as if it had a life of its own,” Lynn suggested, “as if it was meant to be here on this island. And now that I know what the book is about …”
“But that’s the big question,” Ernie argued. “Why is that book about us, about Lammerty Island? It still doesn’t make any sense. Your story—and I don’t say I reject it—is, well, preposterous enough, but there’s just too much else that’s inexplicable. I can accept some things. I can accept that you might have bought another book sometime during the year, a book called Late at Night with a setting such as this island; I can accept that on that particular afternoon in the future you would have set it down on the night table and that when you stepped into the future, that particular afternoon, you saw it on the night table. I can even accept your somehow being able to bring it back with you when you returned to your own time. But—and this is the million-dollar question for which there seems to be no answer—why is that book about us, about what’s happening tonight?”
Andrea didn’t waste any time coming up with an explanation. “I can think of only one reason. One of us must have written it. One of us will write it, if we survive, after we have left the island.”
“And it will be written, sold, published, printed, and distributed to bookstores in the space of six months? Andrea, I’m a writer. Books are hardly ever produced that quickly.”
“But is it impossible, Ernie? That’s what I’m asking. Tell me it’s impossible for a book to be written, and everything else you said, in only six months. Publishers rushed out books on Son of Sam and the Jim Jones cult, that Guyana massacre business, in less time than that. Paperback publishers. Is it really impossible?”
“No, I guess not. And Lynn, naturally being curious about it, might well have a copy of it on her night table in Boston six months from now. Yes, yes—I’m beginning to think you may be right.”
“You know,” Andrea said, “in all the hysteria earlier I forgot to mention that I checked the copyright date for Late at Night. It was for this year, which it would have to be if it’s supposed to be published in six months time. But it doesn’t really prove anything either way.”
“Did you happen to check the date of first printing?” Ernie asked her. She shook her head no. “Damn! That’s the first thing I should have done, but I was so upset … It would really have told us what was up.”
They heard from Anton after a prolonged silence. “You mean—” he sat down on the sofa, his face turning green. “That book might well come true. All of it. I might actually die … that way?”
“Maybe not,” Ernie said. ”Late at Night is fiction, after all. And novelists are known to exaggerate when they base their stories on real life events.”
“We’re being punished, I know it,” Lynn cried out. “I’m being punished. For doing what I did. If I hadn’t interfered, none of this would have happened. That book would have been just a piece of fiction. But now it’s coming true. The forces on this island are making it come true.”
“Not forces,” Andrea argued. “One force. One person. I’ve already establish
ed it. I just don’t know who it is.”
“Then I was right,” Lynn said. “I sensed that at least two individuals were trying to find the book psychically. When you stormed into my bedroom I knew you were one of them. I was trying to block the book’s emissions. That’s why I’ve been so confused, so preoccupied since we arrived.”
“Then it was you.”
“Yes, Andrea. But I’m not the one doing those awful things you accused me of. For a moment, I was afraid it might have been you.”
“Now that I think of it,” Ernie said. “I do remember in the book there was some mention of an evil—what did they call him? No, they referred to it as an ‘it,’ the necromancer. An evil person, sex unknown, who was committing all these atrocities on the island.”
Andrea whirled on him. “Who was it? Did you find out?”
“I never got that far.”
“Next time we get our hands on that book we’re going to look at the last page first and work our way backwards. Speaking of which—”
But she was cut off by Anton, who had risen from the couch and was slowly advancing on Lynn, as he had done once before up in her room. “You bitch. You rotten piece of slime. You’re behind this. All of it. You wrote that stupid book and now you’re doing everything you can—you and Everson—to make your sleazy horror tale come true. What do you think? You’ll make it sell better if we all conveniently kick the bucket? Well, I’m not playing.”
“Anton,” Andrea said. “She’s leveled with us. I’m sure she’s not the—what did you call it, Ernie —the necromancer—”
“I’m sure she is. She’s the one behind all this. Even if her story is true, it doesn’t clear her of the other charges. Besides, she hasn’t explained what the book was doing taped to the bottom of her mattress.”
“I noticed that the books had been disturbed,” Lynn said. “The books on the shelf over there. I saw that Late at Night was missing. I didn’t want anyone to have it. I was afraid they’d be in danger.”
“So you leave it right out in the open where anyone—”
Late at Night Page 23