Uncertain Voyage

by Dorothy Gilman

  But there weren’t going to be any witnesses, there never were, not in real life. And even if someone had seen the incident—which was visually impossible—who on earth would take even a moment to speculate on foul play or to become involved in such a matter?

  There was the hotel, of course…There at least she was a paying guest, with a room number, a name, and luggage still in her room. Yes, they might wonder about a missing guest—but not until another day had passed, and then the maid would only conclude with a smile that the señora was due to check out, and then they would ring to ask if she planned to stay longer. But meeting no success how long would it be before they deduced that something had happened to the American señora? Days perhaps. Hotels did not welcome mysteries and perhaps, like herself, they avoided facing facts as long as possible.

  What then?

  “Not a single clue,” she whispered. “Not one single blasted hint of where I might have gone, or what could have happened to me.” Her passport was in the hotel safe. In her suitcase the police might find the copy of her passport photograph and with this they could approach the cab drivers and bellhops at the front door, but by that time the trail would be very cold. The police would have to deduce that she had not left the island legally but that she might have left it illegally. Eventually, in time, they would learn from the Carmichael Travel Agency in Bruxton, Massachusetts, that Melissa Aubrey was a very legal person, and this would distress them because then they would have to assume that something very wicked had happened to her on their lovely island. But still they would have no way of guessing in what she could have become involved. The one man in Palma to whom she could have run for help was the same man from whom she had fled in terror….

  For that matter, knowing about Marc West, it was quite possible that Señor Castigar had smoothly explained her absence to the hotel in advance, and that she was no longer even a guest there.

  In any case she was utterly without hope of rescue. She had almost literally been wiped off the face of the earth. She was here, and no one would ever know that she was here, and at the full realization of her helplessness she felt panic well up inside her and knew she was going to scream in a moment. She did scream and, frightened, waited for footsteps or a reply. There were neither, there was only this unending silence, as if the world outside had ceased to be and she was the only person alive. Her worst nightmare had come true: the world had abandoned her. “Dear God, how can you do this to me,” she cried. “What have I done to deserve this?” She began to cry with enormous engulfing sobs until—most terrifying of all—there came to her the words that Charles had used over and over when she left him: “How can you do this to me,” he had cried. “What have I done to deserve this?”

  * * *

  —

  The cell door opened, letting in light. Had it been a dream then, had rescue come after all, was it really a joke? Arturo stood framed in the doorway holding a flashlight. “You will come,” he said. “The Señor will see you before he retires for the night.”

  No, it had not been a dream. Wordlessly Melissa followed him through the dark labyrinth of a cellar, up wooden stairs and into a brilliantly lit kitchen. The lights staggered her: lights beating down on glittering white tile walls, light playing across white porcelain freezers, lights striking glints across aluminum-doored cupboards, and light captured by great copper pots suspended from the ceiling. Melissa was blinded and put a hand over her eyes.

  “This way,” bid Arturo.

  This was a home, and she was homeless. People lived here—and she was brought up from a dark cell in the earth where there was not even a mattress for her bed. Beware, she thought, feeling familiar waves of grief sweep through her.

  Señor Castigar was waiting for her in the same room. Flowers at his desk. Long silken curtains drawn across the windows. The sheen of mahogany. It was a beautiful room and its delicacies were an assault to the senses after the bleakness of her cell. On the mantel she saw a marble clock: it was three o’clock in the morning.

  “Ah yes, Mrs. Aubrey,” said Señor Castigar in his damnably kind, suave voice. But he did not suggest a chair this time nor rise at her entrance, and her nerves trembled at this rebuff. He remained comfortably seated, examining his fingernails with interest. “I have dined out,” he said, and glanced up, but although his glance was swift and brief she was aware that it was clinically thorough and missed neither the tear-stained cheeks nor the sullen eyes. “Before retiring I thought—because I like you—”

  Damn him, she thought, feeling her heart lift at these words.

  “—that I would ask if you see the folly of your ways after twelve hours of reflection in my little cell. There is, you see, no need for you to remain down there. You have only to discuss Stearns with me and you will become a guest in my house.”

  She nodded. A guest in his house.

  “You see, I will not bring you up here again,” he pointed out softly. “I wish you to understand this. You will not see this room again.”

  She nodded.

  “Now supposing you sit down and tell me what Stearns gave to you.”

  “No,” she said.

  He shrugged. “But you see there is no point to your suffering like this when you can spend the rest of the night in my guest room and be returned to your hotel in the morning.”

  He was offering her life again, he was offering her the hotel and a return to the new life she had only begun. Longing stirred in her and at this moment it occurred to her that to choose death over life must be the most unrealistic act of all.

  “Perhaps you do not believe me when I say I will let you leave,” he told her softly. “But you see, I can be fairly sure that you would avoid the Anglo-Majorcan Export Company. It is not a pleasant experience, becoming a traitor to one’s own country, but you would have the pleasant compensation of being a live traitor. Now. Of what possible use is this attitude of yours?”

  She bit her lip. “I don’t know.”

  He smiled charmingly. “It is so very meaningless. You are here, there is no hope, you will remain here and in time you will die.” Ever so subtly his voice stressed the latter phrase. “What are you proving? There is no one to prove anything to. Stearns? He is dead. Me? Well, really, what difference do I make? I only take orders. The Anglo-Majorcan Export Company? They do not even know of your existence, and never will.”

  He was so damnably right. “I don’t know,” she said numbly, and she didn’t know.

  “Give up, my dear,” he said, watching her closely. “What is the use of this nonsense?”

  “I don’t know,” she repeated dully.

  He sat back. “You have so many years ahead. Love, marriage—” He hesitated and then drew from his pocket an envelope which he placed on his desk. “This was intercepted at your hotel this afternoon.”

  She stared at unfamiliar writing addressed to herself at her hotel in Mallorca, Español. She said, “That is no one I know.”

  “It is signed Adam.” He was watching her with narrowed eyes.

  Adam? She regarded Señor Castigar with some astonishment, and then she remembered that she had asked him earlier about Adam, naming him, and she understood that this was another trick to persuade her back to life. “You are very clever, Señor,” she said wearily.

  “I see that you are not familiar with the handwriting,” he said forgivingly. “But you have in your wallet a slip of paper—an address—with writing that matches this. I compared them.”

  She said with tired scorn, “You forged the writing, then, of course.”

  “You are stubborn,” said Señor Castigar with a sigh. He drew a single sheet of paper from the envelope and placed it on the desk between them. “You may read the last few lines,” he said. “They are personal enough, perhaps, to reassure you of what you cannot seem to believe. Later when you cooperate you may have the whole letter.”

  She leaned o
ver the desk, perversely glancing first at the phrases at the top of the letter which Señor Castigar’s fingers did not entirely conceal. Her eye caught fragments here and there:

  …awoke in the middle of the night…that hypothetical situation which I so heedlessly dismissed…and then Recalling…in his atrocious hot tweeds and…

  “Adam?” she thought tremulously, something stirring in her deeply.

  Señor Castigar’s hand moved to cover what she had been reading, and now her glance dropped to the last lines.

  I must hear from you at once that you are all right, Adam wrote. When you receive this I will he reaching Zurich, the Hotel Trümpy. Telephone me collect. My darling, am I to forever remember and worry about you?

  “Oh Adam,” she thought sadly, knowing that nothing could be changed now, that it was too late, that she was here and yet might not be here if Adam’s letter had reached her earlier, diverting her from what she had to do. She thought, “It must not matter too much, I must not think about this or Señor Castigar will use it as a tool to get what he wishes. Nothing has changed, or can. It has to be enough just to know that he wrote these lines, that he did not too quickly forget.”

  “Well?”

  She mutely shook her head.

  His lips thinned. He said curtly, “Very well then, I can have no more patience with you. I have discovered since I last saw you that I must leave Palma tomorrow afternoon, and since I certainly have no intention of leaving you here alive I think you can draw your own conclusions. You understand?”

  To be shocked was a relative thing: she had already sustained several shocks and now a faraway part of her was both amused and surprised to realize that she could be shocked again—she felt it in the icy shiver that went down her spine—in the awareness that even this small circle of safety was about to shrink. She could not cling to anything. There was nothing left.

  Señor Castigar said crisply, “I will give you until one o’clock tomorrow afternoon—no, this afternoon, for the day has begun—to decide whether you wish to live or die. At that hour Arturo serves lunch. He will arrive with your tray and you may tell him your decision.”

  She carefully wet her lips. “And how—that is, what means do you use for killing your prisoners?” As soon as she had spoken she was sorry to have betrayed her weakness.

  He smiled, obviously pleased that she had asked. “Oh, I am quite humane,” he said, “and very up-to-date. Your cell is actually a gas chamber, equipped with two pipes for the entry of gas. Two people have already died there.”

  She nodded dumbly. Two people had already died there. But horror piled upon horror only brought a different feeling of unrealness to her, and death was death after all, no matter how it arrived.

  “Unless,” he said carefully, not looking at her, “you care to talk about this now.”

  She longed to say Yes, longed to deliver herself of this weight of fear and conflict, and for a moment she wavered yet knew that somehow—for what reason she didn’t know—she must hang on if only because, without realness, she must stubbornly make it as difficult as possible both for herself and for this man to get what each wanted: for him the book, for herself freedom.

  He opened the drawer of his desk and brought out a wristwatch and she recognized it as hers. “You may take this back with you,” he said pointedly. “You may watch each of the hours fly past and reflect upon a life that has much promise, if you only learn the art of compromise. I give you until one o’clock today. Good-by,” he said in an indifferent voice, and his contempt was another wound.

  Arturo led her back into the depths of the house and to the cell that was now as black and silent as a tomb, and this time when the door closed behind her it rang with a new finality. It appeared that having committed herself to life only a number of hours ago she had sentenced herself to death.

  She began to shiver inconsolably.

  17

  Sometime during the course of the long black night—propped up against the wall, her coat around her shoulders—some semblance of understanding began to stir in Melissa, as if deep inside of her a long battle had raged and been lost, and now—but only now—she could acknowledge her defeat and begin slowly, humbly to count her dead and dying illusions. She began first of all with an acceptance of where she was, and an acceptance of the fact that she had committed herself to helping Stearns—it no longer mattered why—and that she had failed. And having failed, she must therefore pay the price and pay it alone: this much was irrevocable. And perhaps, she thought, it was only justice that she make the acquaintance of failure now, for in avoiding failure all of her life she had also avoided success. She was a stranger to both.

  Yet it was strange to count over her losses and routs and discover one missing: it had not occurred to her—not seriously at least—to give Señor Castigar the book that he wanted, and this was a piece that did not fit the puzzle of herself. She examined this with a curious detachment and asked herself if she could buy back her new life with Stearns’ book. Could she? She wanted very much to live….

  She sighed, trying to imagine the Melissa who could rise phoenixlike from the ashes to walk free from this house into the sunshine. She tried to feel that woman, to be that woman for a moment; but it was not difficult at all, for she had been that Melissa for all of her life as she ran from risk and responsibility. She saw that to give Señor Castigar the book and walk free from this cell was to remain forever in captivity, and that it was here in this cell that she was truly free, because for the first time in her life she was taking a stand, she was carrying out a commitment that she had made and resisting the delicious ease of purchasing safety for herself at the cost of integrity. For she knew the accompanying despairs of self-betrayal by rote now: the feelings of emptiness and loss, the restless dreams at night, the small escapes that in time interred the spirit. She had already borne their weights, she was an old friend of ease, concealment, and guilt. She had been there before.

  Only something better could erase the lost years.

  Only a new country—only the terrain of struggle—held any hope for her because it was a route she had never traveled.

  Only something better…

  Was death better?

  There were a variety of deaths for a human, she realized with new clarity, and of them all the most horrible was to become no more than an empty but still living shell. Merely to survive was no longer enough. The greatest suffering in life was to live without suffering, to function without soul or integrity, an uninhabited human without feeling, without pain, without hope. If she failed to discharge this first responsibility of her life, given to her by a dead man, the whole structure of her future would be founded upon betrayal.

  No, she could not give up Stearns’ book.

  Melissa dozed, and waking cold and tired she remembered Adam, for Adam was the first realness she had known and she must cling to him now as to a spar. From the window high in the wall near the ceiling came a shaft of light so pale and silvery she thought it might be moonlight. That was real, and the cell was real; and from these two tangibles she must draw conclusions about the intangible, which was Adam. Once—only ten days ago—he had been as touchable as the wall beside her, and then he had vanished into time and space, leaving no proof at all that he had ever existed or was real.

  No proof at all, she thought—except in the tenderness he had left behind like a trail of phosphorous.

  She sat up and leaned against the wall, her eyes fastened upon the square of moonsilver. It was suddenly urgent to discover what was real. The question was whether she existed here alone in this cell, for if she was real then Adam was also real. It was this doubt of her own realness that had prevented her from feeling life during those years with Charles, and it was why Charles had made no more impression upon her soul than the silken touch of a feather drawn lightly over a surface. Looking back she thought of herself as having been enclosed in
a skin of transparent, hard shell that by the nature of its surface kept all truly felt experience from entering her. She had lived but felt nothing, which was the ultimate isolation. That shell, she remembered, feeling it now in retrospect, had been composed actually of interlocked muscles so tense with anxiety that everything happening to her had been quite literally like water rolling off a duck’s back, incapable of penetrating or leaving any imprint or memory.

  In her healing this shell had begun to dissolve, she was becoming flesh again, she was beginning—falteringly and spasmodically—to feel once more, to acquire memory, and to people the impoverished country of her mind.

  But if people never experienced life, she thought with astonishment, then they were forever doomed to emptiness, to loss of touch, to speaking at but never with each other. How many words had never been listened to, she wondered; how many emotions unfelt until life became no more than a play on a stage watched from the alienation of great distance. With Adam she had felt both herself and life and then she had suffered a relapse, doubting both herself and life, because there was no one to explain to her the truth of Adam. But who was he really, she mused, except a man experienced through her own humanness, her reactions screened and sifted through her own responses. To an observer he might have appeared any number of people: a rake, a kindly, disillusioned man, an indulgent playboy, or a ruthless egoist. She had longed for someone to tell her who he was but did it matter who he was when she had been moved with all her senses by what he was? Was any response authentic other than her own?