by Jerry
O’Shaughnessy won’t commit himself on this point, not even by a monosyllable. Just looks at his host, keeps his own counsel. It sounds reasonable enough, Lord knows, but he can’t forget the girl’s clear, sane eyes, nor Denholt’s hungry, probing, almost gloating, stare. If anyone is crazy in this house—the little chill plays on his spine once more, and his flesh crawls under the borrowed clothes.
They have very little to say to one another, after that, while they sit there puffing away and the fire in the hearth slowly dies down into itself.
The girl is in the adjoining room, washing the dishes. The waning fire throws the two men’s shadows on the walls, long and wavering. Denholt’s, in particular, looks like that of a monster breathing smoke out of its nostrils. O’Shaughnessy grins a little at the idea.
He crushes out his cigarette. “Well,” he says, “looks like the storm’ll keep up all night. Guess I better make a break for it.”
Denholt stiffens, then smiles. “You’re not thinking of leaving now? You’ll spend the rest of the night wandering around in circles out there in the dark! Wait till daylight at least, maybe it’ll let up by then. There’s an extra room back there, you won’t be any trouble at all.”
The girl says from the doorway, almost frightenedly, “Oh, please, don’t go yet, Mr. O’Shaughnessy! It’s so nice having you.”
She waits for his answer.
O’Shaughnessy gives them both a long look in turn. Then he uncrosses his long legs, recrosses them the other way around. “I’m staying, then,” he says quietly.
Denholt gets up. “I’ve a little work to finish—something I was in the midst of when—er, your arrival interrupted me. If you’ll excuse me for a few minutes—You can go to bed any time you feel like it.” And then, with a covert glance toward the kitchen doorway, “Just bear in mind what I said. Don’t take anything she says too seriously.”
The girl comes in after the doctor has gone, sits shyly down on the opposite side of the cleared table. That strange hungry look of hers rests steadily on his face, as if she never had seen anyone like him before.
“I’m glad you’re staying,” she murmurs finally. “I wanted you to because—well, maybe if you’re here, I won’t have to take my injection.” O’Shaughnessy droops his lids a little. “What kind of an injection?” he says with almost somnolent slowness.
She turns her hand up, down again. “I don’t know, I only know I have to take them. About once a month. He says it’s bad for me if I miss any. Tomorrow would be the day, if you hadn’t come.” She screws up her eyes at him pathetically. “I don’t like them, because they hurt so, and they make me feel so ill afterward. Once I tried to run away, but I couldn’t get through the fence.”
There’s something a little flinty in O’Shaughnessy’s eyes that wasn’t there before. “And what’d he do when he caught you?” His own hand on the table flexes a little.
“Oh nothing. Just talked to me, told me I had to have them whether I liked it or not. He said it was for my own sake he gives them to me. He said if I went too long without getting one—”
“What would happen?”
“He didn’t say. Just said something pretty awful.”
O’Shaughnessy growls to himself deep in his throat. Drugging, eh? Maybe that’s why she can’t remember further back than two years, and why she says such weird things from time to time. But on second thought, it can’t be that, either. The infrequency of the injections argue against it. There wouldn’t be pain, if it were some kind of a drug. And if it were something able to affect her memory of the far past, why not the recent past as well? O’Shaughnessy’s no medical man, but he’s knocked around enough to know a little something; in the Orient and South America he’s seen the telltale traces of almost every known narcotic under the sun. There is absolutely no sign of it about Nova. She is as fresh as that rain falling from the sky outside.
He only asks her one question, to make sure. “Do you dream—dream about pretty things—after you’ve had one of these shots?”
“No,” she shudders, “I feel like I’m all on fire. I woke up once and there was all ice around me—”
Not a drug, then. Maybe he has Denholt all wrong; maybe she really does need these treatments—vaccine or serum it sounds like—maybe she had some ghastly illness that robbed her of her memory, the use of her limbs, two years ago, and these injections are to speed her recovery, guard her against a relapse. Still, Denholt did try to pass her off as mentally unbalanced, when she isn’t at all. No, there’s something the man is up to—something secret and—and ugly. The barbed-wire fence, the alarm-bell show that too. Why bring her way up here when she could have far better care and attention—if she needs any—at a hospital in one of the big cities?
“Did you really mean what you said about only learning to walk and talk the spring before last?”
“Yes,” she says. “I’ll show you one of the copy-books he taught me out of.” She comes back with a dog-eared primer.
He thumbs through it. “C is for Cat. Does-the-Cat-see-the-Rat?” He closes it, more at sea than ever.
“Were you as big as now when he taught you to walk?”
“Yes. I wore this same dress I have on now, that’s how I can tell. I learned by myself, mostly. He used to put me down on the floor over there by the wall, and then put a lump of sugar on a chair all the way across the room, and coax me to walk over to get it. If I crawled on my hands and knees, he wouldn’t let me have the sugar. After awhile I got so I could stand up straight—”
“Stop!” he says, with a sudden sharp intake of breath. “It’s enough to make a person go crazy just trying to figure out! There’s—there’s craziness in it somewhere! And I know on whose part. Not yours! God knows what he did to you the first twenty years of your life to make you forget everything you should have known—”
She doesn’t answer. She can’t seem to understand what he means. But her eyes show fright at the force of his speech. He sees he may do more harm than good by telling her other people aren’t like she is. She’s grown up, and she’s been held here in some kind of mental thralldom—that’s the closest he can get to the answer. And the man that would do that to another human being is a monster and a maniac.
His voice hoarse with pity and anger, he says, “Tell me now, did you ever see any other man but me and the doctor before in your life?”
“No,” she breathes, “that’s why I like you so much.”
“Didn’t you even ever see another girl—have someone like yourself around you to talk with?”
“No,” she murmurs again. “Only him. No one else at all.”
He rises as if he can’t stand any more of it, takes three quick turns around his chair, raises it, bangs it down again.
She watches him timidly, not speaking, with just that fright in her eyes. He slumps down in his chair again, looks at her broodingly. Somehow he knows he’s going to take her with him when he leaves, and he wonders if he has any right to. What’ll he do with her afterward—turn her loose like a lamb among wolves? Drag her around with him from bar to cantina to bistro, when he’s not up in the air risking his neck for some Chinese war lord or Nicaraguan outlaw? His kind of a life—At least she has peace here, and a sort of security.
The bolts shoot back behind the laboratory door. He sees her glance past him, but doesn’t turn his head to look. On the wall opposite Denholt’s long wavering silhouette appears more ominous now than before. Madman, criminal, Samaritan—which? Playing the role of God to this girl—in some obscure way that O’Shaughnessy cannot fathom even yet—which he has no right to do. Better the cantinas and the tropical hell-holes of his own life. If she has anything in her, she’ll rise above them; this way she hasn’t even a chance to do that.
Her quick whisper reaches him while Denholt is in the act of closing the door after him. “Don’t let him give me another injection. Maybe if you ask him not to he’ll listen to you!”
“You’ve had your last!” O’Shaughnessy say
s, decisively.
Denholt approaches the table, looks suspiciously from one to the other. Then a smile crosses his face. “Still up, eh? How about a nice hot toddy for both of us before we turn in?” Nova makes a move to leave her chair and he quickly forestalls her. “I’ll fix it myself.”
O’Shaughnessy doesn’t miss that. He stares up into the other’s face, takes his time about answering. “Why not?” he says, finally, jutting out his chin.
Denholt goes into the kitchen. O’Shaughnessy can see him pouring whiskey into two tumblers, spooning sugar, from where he is. The doctor keeps looking obliquely out at him from time to time, with a sort of smirk of satisfaction on his face.
O’Shaughnessy says quietly to the girl, sitting there feasting her eyes on him with a doglike devotion: “Go over there to my coat, hanging up over the fireplace. You’ll find an oil-silk packet in the inside pocket, full of papers and things. Take the papers out and just bring me the folder. Don’t let him see you.”
He thrusts the moisture-proof oblong down just under the collar of his shirt, buttons the neck over it, stretches the collarband out as far as it will go, to create a gap. Then he bends forward a little, sticks his elbows on the table, rests his chin on his hands. His upthrust arms obscure his chest and neck. He drawls something she doesn’t understand—one more of the many incomprehensible things he is always saying: “I can smell a Mickey a mile away.”
Denholt comes in with the two toddies, says to her, “You’d better go to your room now, Nova, it’s getting late, and you’re going to need all your strength. Tomorrow, you know.”
She shivers when she hears that, slowly withdraws under the compulsion of Denholt’s stare, sending appealing looks at O’Shaughnessy. A door closes after her somewhere in the back.
Denholt has noticed the telegraphic communication between them. “I don’t know what my ward has been telling you—” he begins.
O’Shaughnessy is not showing his cards yet. “Not a thing, Doc,” he says. “Not a thing. Why? Is there something she could tell?”
“No, no, of course not,” Denholt covers up hastily. “Only—er, she gets delusions about injections and things. That’s why I don’t allow her in the laboratory any more. She caught me giving a rabbit an injection one day, and she’d be perfectly capable of telling you that it was she I gave it to, and what’s more, believing it herself. Let’s drink up, shall we?”
He hands his guest one of the two glasses. O’Shaughnessy takes it with one hand, keeps the other cupped along the line of his jaw. He hoists it an eighth of an inch. “Here’s to tomorrow.”
Denholt’s piercing gaze transfixes him for a minute. Then he relaxes into a slow, derisive smile. “Here’s to tonight he contradicts, “tomorrow will take care of itself.”
O’Shaughnessy thrusts the rim of his glass up under his lower lip, slowly levels it until it is horizontal—and empty. The forked hand supporting his chin is between it and Denholt. He’s a sloppy drinker, the collar of his shirt gets a little wet . . .
The yellow-green of the doctor’s oil-lamp recedes waveringly from the doorway of the bedroom O’Shaughnessy is to occupy. Pitch-blackness wells up all around, cut by an occasional calcium-flare of lightning outside the high, small window. The flashes are less frequent now and the rain has let up.
O’Shaughnessy is lying flat on his back, on the rickety cot. He has left on his trousers and shirt. Denholt said, perhaps with ghastly double meaning, “I’m sure you’ll be dead to the world in no time at all!” as he went out just now. The first thing the flyer does, as the waning lamp-glow finally snuffs out altogether and a door closes somewhere in the distance, is to take out the bulging waterlogged oil-silk envelope from his shirt and let its contents trickle silently onto the floor.
The rustle of the slackening rain outside begins to lull his senses before he knows it. The ache of his wrenched shoulder lessens, is erased by oncoming sleep. The lids of his eyes droop closed. He catches them the first time, holds them open by sheer will-power. Not a sound, not a whisper comes to help him keep awake. The lonely mountain-house is deathly still; only the rain and the far-off thunder sound outside. The girl’s story begins to take on a dream-like quality, unreal, remote, fantastic—
The muffled creak of a pine wood floor-board, somewhere just beyond the open door of his room, jerks his senses awake. At first he thinks he’s still at the stick of his plane, makes vague motions to keep from going into a tailspin . . . Then he remembers where he is.
Twenty minutes, half an hour, an hour maybe, since Denholt’s murky lamp-glow flickered away from the door. Maybe even more than that. O’Shaughnessy swears at himself mentally for fading out like this. But it’s all right; if this is it now—
It must be deep in the night. There’s no rain now any more, just the plink of loose drops as they detach themselves one by one from the eaves. A pale silver radiance, little more than a phantom glint, is coming through the window up over him. Dawn? No, a late moon, veiled by the last of the storm clouds.
The creak is repeated, closer at hand, a little more distinct this time. He can hear breathing with it. Outstretched there on the cot, he begins drawing up his knees closer to his body, tensing himself for the spring. What’ll he have—a knife, a gun, some viciously-keen surgical instrument? O’Shaughnessy widens his arms, into a sort of simulation of a welcoming embrace. The dark hides the great fists, the menacing grin at his mouth.
Something comes over the threshold. O’Shaughnessy can sense the stirring of air at its furtive passage, rather than see or hear anything. There’s a whispered footfall within the room itself. A blur of motion glides momentarily through the wan silvery light, which isn’t strong enough to focus it clearly, into the concealing dark on his side of it.
There’s a clang from the bucked cot-frame, the upward fling of a body, a choked sound of fright as a pair of arms lash out in a bear-hug. In the soft purring tones of a tea-kettle O’Shaughnessy’s voice pours out unprintable maledictions.
Her softness warns him just in time, before he’s done more than pinion her arms fast and drive all the breath out of her body. “Don’t,” she pants, “it’s me.” His arms drop away, he blows out breath like a steam-valve, the reaction staggers him back a step to the wall, off balance. “You! Why didn’t you whisper a warning? I was—”
“I was afraid he’d hear me. He’s in the laboratory. He left the door open behind him and I’ve been watching him from outside in the dark—”
“What’s he think he’s going to do, give you one of them shots again?”
“No, it’s you—he’s going to do something to you, I don’t know what! He took your coat in there, and took all the papers in it and burned them. Then he—he lit flames under all those big glass things, and put a needle in a pan to soak, like he does with me. But this time he has a silk cord in there with him, and he made a big loop in it and measured it round his own neck first, then took it off again and practiced throwing it and pulling it tight. He’s got a big black thing in there too, you hold it this way and point it—”
“A gun,” says O’Shaughnessy softly, mockingly. “He’s not missing any bets, is he? Knockout drops, a noose, a positive. How’s he fixed for hand-grenades?”
She puts the flats of her hands against his chest. “Don’t stay, please!
I don’t want—things like that to happen to you! Go before he gets through! He’s awfully quick and strong, you ought to see how he ran after me that time when I tried to get to the fence! Maybe you can sneak by outside the door without his seeing you, or get out one of the windows—Don’t stand there without moving like that! Please don’t wait. That’s why I came in here to you. There’s steam coming from the pan the needle’s in already. I saw it!” And then, in a low heartbroken wail, “Aren’t you going to go?”
Instead he sits down on the edge of the cot, leisurely puts on the soiled canvas shoes Denholt has lent him. Reaches toward her, draws her over, and stands her before him.
“Nova, d
’you like me?” he says.
“I like you very much.”
He rubs his hair awry with one hand, as though at his wits’ end. “Don’t be givin’ me any blarney now. D’you want to marry me?”
“What’s marry?”
“I ought to be shot,” he says softly to himself. “Well—d’you want to be with me always, go wherever I go, tell me how good I am when I’m good, buck me up when I’m down in the dumps—and one of these days, pretty soon, wear black for me?”
“Yes,” she says softly, “I want to be near you. If that’s to marry, then that’s what I want.”
He puts out his hand at her. “Shake, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy! Now let’s get out of here.” He goes over to the door, looks out at the distant bar of light escaping across their path from the open laboratory-door. “Got anything you want to bring with you? You’re standing in the middle of your wardrobe right now, I guess. Got any idea where he keeps that key?”
“The one to the padlock on the gate outside? In the pockets of his coat, I guess; he always seems to reach in there for it. He hasn’t got it on, though; he’s got on that white thing he wears in the laboratory. It must be in the room where he sleeps.”
“Okay, we’ll try lifting it. I wouldn’t mind roughing that bird up, only I don’t want anything to happen to you. He’s probably got an aim, with that gun of his, like a cockeyed nervewreck with palsy. Stick close behind me.”
V
They glide through the velvety dark, O’Shaughnessy in the lead, the girl behind him, keeping contact with her fingers resting lightly against the back of his shoulder. The vague outline of the room-doorway seems to move toward them, not they toward it, to come abreast, to slip past. Ahead there is just that bar sinister of bleaching whiteness, falling across the floor of the main room and leaping up one wall.
“Gotta watch these boards,” he breathes across his shoulder, “you woke me up getting in here, and you don’t weigh what I do.” The touch of her fingers against his back tells him she’s shaking all over. “It’s all right. You’re with me now.”
