The house itself he didn’t like. What its style was, he could not have told, he was no architect. It was of light-colored stone, and it was low and spreading. Though it was of two-story height, it tricked the eye into taking it for one story only; for almost all the windows on the lower floor, particularly in the front, were of the elongated type that open like doors, and they took up so great a proportion of the façade that only a small strip along the top was left for the upper-story windows, and these were small inconspicuous squares by comparison.
It was not gloomy looking nor sinister in any respect. And yet it was too massive, too classically formal in design, to be exactly prepossessing or to appear livable. It had somewhat the neuter characteristics of a public building. It should have been an art gallery or a library or some sort of community center. Then you would have wanted to go in and roam around with enjoyment. But you wouldn’t have wanted to sleep in it. It didn’t give that kind of urge.
“How long have you lived in it?”
“All my life.”
“Then you don’t mind it, I guess,” he said softly, reflectively.
They got out and went up the short paved approach to the front entrance. At the base of the steps, as a sort of permanent cachet of proprietorship, there was a bronze wreath embedded in the pavement, circling the letters W. R., also in bronze. Small, but ineradicable.
“I thought your father’s name was—”
“That was Father’s father,” she said. “He built this place. You had to come all the way out here by carriage in those days. And if you started the first thing in the morning, you could make it by dusk.” She stroked the initials with her foot. “He made all the money in the family. I never knew him, but I sort of envy him.”
“Why, because he made all the money in the family?”
“Oh, no; because he had about twenty years of his own before he started to make it. Neither Father nor I ever had that, ourselves.”
There were two marble lions couchant on slabs, one on each side of the steps. Or lionesses, perhaps, for they lacked manes. Rather small, somewhat less than life size. The marble was streaked and yellowed in places from the elements. He palmed the head of one as they went up the steps.
“These are a little unfortunate, don’t you think? They must meet his eye every time he goes in or out.”
“I thought of having them removed, back in the beginning, but then I never did anything about it. I’ve watched him, and they don’t seem to have any meaning to him when he goes by them. He’s so used to them, I don’t think they register on his eyes any more. They’re stone, and he doesn’t think of what they were originally intended to represent, they’re just part of the doorway now. It’s the—real ones he’s afraid of.”
A butler had the door open for them by the time they were ready to enter. Evidently having seen them alight, he had been at hand waiting to perform this duty ever since. He was a rather wholesome-looking man in his late forties or early fifties; certainly there was nothing of the decrepit family retainer about him.
If, on his part, he was surprised to see her return after an overnight absence, and accompanied by someone never seen before, he didn’t show it. He glanced at Shawn with respectful brevity, no more.
“This is Mr. Shawn, Weeks; a friend of mine. He has a bag in the back of the car. And, oh—the room opposite Father’s, the one across the hall.”
Shawn looked around him with amiable vacuity, such as a random guest might show. “Well, it was very nice of you to have me, Jean.”
“Father hasn’t been feeling himself lately. We don’t exactly know what’s the matter with him. Do we, Weeks?”
She fixed a discretionary eye on the man, that, while it pretended to include him and exclude Shawn from its confidence, in actuality included Shawn and excluded the butler.
“No, we don’t, miss,” the man answered docilely.
She dropped her voice a trifle. “How is he, Weeks?”
“The same, miss.”
He went out to bring in Shawn’s prop bag.
“I’ll show you around, before I take you up to him,” she offered. She led him off the entrance hall, to the left, through a large, nearly ceiling-high door. “This is the drawing room.” He went in and moved around, leaving her there by the threshold.
He was there on a job. A specialized job. He wasn’t there as a guest, nor as an appraiser of antiques. He was conscientious about what he was there for. He showed this plainly. He glanced at the room as a whole first, from mid-center. Then he moved about it marginally, testing whatever outward openings there were. The windows; tried them for fastness, opened them, looked out, closed them, tried them once more for fastness.
She moved on. “This is where we dine.”
He examined whatever inward openings there were, closets, passage doors, alcoves.
She noted that. Once she smiled very faintly at it, unseen, unguessed by him.
“This is Father’s study.”
He tilted over a book or two, as if to make their titles more easily decipherable. Or perhaps it was to see what substance there was backing the shelves.
And when they came to a marble fireplace in one of the rooms, he even crouched down and looked upward into it, to see whether it was an open or an artificial one.
“It’s real,” she murmured.
He turned and caught her expression.
“I know,” he said. “But my assignment is to keep physical harm from him. Without knowing what form it may take, nor which direction it may come from.”
She led the way out again.
“And that’s the conservatory, that end room down there.”
She answered the unspoken question she detected on his face.
“I’m not sure myself what a conservatory is. We use it once in a while when we have to endure someone’s singing or someone’s recital on the piano.”
On each side of it a ceiling-high stained glass window was set into the blank wall.
“Those are fake,” she admitted as he started over. “There’s no outlet behind them. Wait, I’ll show you; you can’t get the full effect this way.”
She touched an electric switch and lights hidden behind them glowed on, to throw them into relief. They gleamed out in tones of ruby, emerald, sapphire and amber, like the stained windows of a medieval cathedral. In the center panel of each was a full-length religious figure. Each leaded subdivision surrounding it bore the head of some mythological or heraldic animal—a unicorn, a griffin, a wild boar, a lion, a phoenix.
“They came from England,” she said dully. “Some royal abbey or other. Time of the Plantagenets. More of Grandfather’s work. Transplanted bodily. You know, in those days wealthy Americans went over and transported whole castles intact. He was modest, he was satisfied with just two windows.” She turned the switch again, and they faded.
It occurred to him that, judging by the number of decorative animals around, the seeds of the prophecy might very well have been originally implanted right here in the house, in someone’s evil, too-fertile imagination; but he didn’t tell her so.
A woman was coming down the stairs just as they returned to the hall.
“Jean,” she said breathlessly, and almost ran the remainder of the way.
“Oh, Grace. This is Mrs. Hutchins, Mr. Shawn. A friend of mine, Grace.”
Her face acknowledged him with a nod, but her eyes, her anxiety, never left the girl.
“Jean,” she said again reproachfully. “Jean dear.”
“Were you frightened about me? I’m sorry. We sat up talking all night in a restaurant. It really helped. It took my mind off myself.”
Shawn said, “I didn’t mean to keep Miss Reid out like that.”
Again she acknowledged him, at best, with a parenthetic nod.
“You didn’t tell Father?” Jean said.
“How could I? Nor anybody else. But I couldn’t close my eyes until seven. I called the Gilberts. I called Louise Ordway. Not to ask about you,” she added
hastily. “I made up something, to see if you were there.”
“I wouldn’t have been with them—” Jean started to say deprecatingly, then didn’t continue. “I’m sorry I frightened you, Grace. You shouldn’t worry about me. I’m a big girl now.”
The housekeeper said, “The west bedroom for Mr. Shawn, I believe I heard Weeks say. I must run up and see to things a minute; you didn’t warn us, you know.”
“She doesn’t believe us,” Jean murmured, watching her reascend the stairs. “About you, I mean. I saw the way she looked at you. How could she? She knows all my friends and she never heard your name until just now.”
“You’re young enough yet to continue making friends,” he suggested. “It’s not a process that stops automatically.”
“But so suddenly, out of nowhere. Let’s go up, shall we?”
In the upper hall they stopped again, and he stood waiting expectantly. She was, he could tell, bracing herself mentally. “There, that door,” she said, and then they still stood where they were.
Mrs. Hutchins reappeared, coming out of the door of the room that was to be his, opposite to the one Jean had indicated; tactfully closing it after her, passing them with a wordless smile, and continuing down the stairs.
“I’ll take you in to see him now. Get yourself ready. This is going to be a little hard on both of us.”
“I’m not a person, in a case like this, Miss Reid. I’m a protective agent assigned to this household, and to be here is my detail.”
She put her hand to the knob, and then still waited. “I have to brace myself all over again each time I go in to see him. Even if I left him only a short time before. You see, I remember him as he was—before this.”
She raised her hand to knock.
“Oh, one more thing. There’ll be a number of clocks in there, he can’t surround himself with enough of them. He’ll ask you the time. Take a minute or two off whatever your watch says, make it slow, to match the others. I always turn them back a little, at the start of the day, when he’s not watching. That gives him a minute or two extra, a little borrowed time. It’s the best I can do to ease him. We put them all ahead again when he’s asleep at night, and that starts them off accurate for the new day.”
“He shouldn’t have them in there with him.”
“He’s more frightened without them. He’s afraid it’s going faster, slipping away from him. The imagination, you know, is always more terrible than the reality.”
Her arrested hand at last sounded against the door. “It’s Jean, dear,” she called. “I have someone with me.” And turned the knob and opened without waiting for the formality of consent to be given.
Shawn’s mind ordered his faculties: “Now, get this good. Don’t miss a thing. Now you’re at home plate.”
The man was sitting in the middle of the big room, in an easy chair. It was impossible to tell how old he was, for death has no age. And he was as dead as anything that still moves can ever be. He was basically dressed, but a dressing robe was over his shrunken frame and his feet were in soft leather slippers. A rug or blanket had been walled protectively about his legs by someone. His hair was a clean white, and still copious enough. And whereas, Shawn could guess, a few short weeks ago its color had been the only telltale sign of age about him, that shock of white over a youthful, warm-blooded face, now its role had reversed, now it was the only remaining sign of continuing vitality about him, that shock of clean, healthful white over a collapsed football bladder of a wizened, leathery face. His neck was like a slim sheaf of wires, and their rubbery insulation collapsed in circular folds about them—and very little current still passed through. His eyes were like rivets burning at white heat, eating their way inward through his skull, and deepening the holes they left behind.
There were four timepieces gathered about him. A shelf clock standing on a dresser by the wall, a small upright clock on the table beside him, a wafer-thin pocket watch placed face upward beside that, and an oblong gold one looping from his attenuated wrist on a leather strap whose innermost hole was no longer close enough to buckle it tight. It swung like a bracelet.
Their conglomerate ticking was like the faint chirping of mechanical birds about him.
He addressed Shawn at sight, before she had had a chance to introduce him. “An outsider! I can check now. Have you got one? What have you got? What does yours say?”
Shawn upped his wrist, shielded it with the turn of a hand. He subtracted a minute from the already-slow timepieces in open sight. “Twenty-nine past,” he said, and let his hand drop and the cuff slide concealingly over it again.
Reid’s face lit up joyously.
“Oh, Jean!” he cried. “Jean, do you hear that? That gives me a minute more! Just think, a minute more! Put them back—”
“And I’m even fast, I think,” Shawn added, with a throat-constricting compassion. He thought, For what he’s done to him already, Tompkins deserves the chair—whether he intends doing anything more or not. Slow, with not enough current to kill, the first two shocks!
“Father,” she said, going over to him and reversing a down-fallen plait of hair with softly tender hands, “I want you to know Tom Shawn.”
His burst of enthusiasm began to dampen, as though this wasn’t the first misleading approach that had been made. “Another doctor? Another psychiatrist?”
“No, dear, no.” She built up an elaborate genealogy that was all Greek to Shawn. “You remember Tad Billings. Marie Gordon’s fiancé. The boy that was killed in Florida when his car turned over a couple years ago. We had him here a couple of times. Well, Tom is a—was a classmate of his. I met him at —at one of Marie’s parties at that time.”
“I never knew you went to any,” he said listlessly, as though the subject was too remote to him now to arouse interest any longer.
“Well, anyway, here he is, bag and baggage. I’ve asked him to stay.”
“Don’t you think he should be told what’s going to— Or have you already?”
Shawn sliced his offered hand through her perceptible confusion, extending it toward the older man. “How do you do, sir?” he said heartily.
It was like clasping twigs. He could feel every separate bone. He almost expected them to shatter, they were so brittle, so unclothed.
“You’re a little early, young man—” Reid said wanly. “But welcome to our home all the same.”
“A little early?” Shawn repeated cheerfully. “I didn’t know you were expecting me at any particular—”
“You’re a little early for the funeral.”
• • •
At eleven she rose from her chair. They had been in the drawing room, the three of them.
“I think I’ll go up now. I didn’t—have any too much sleep last night.” Her eyes met Shawn’s in a brief glance of shared understanding.
She went over to the huddled figure in the other chair.
“Good night, Father.”
He didn’t move. He didn’t seem to hear her. His eyes never left the clock, that was like a pale moon against the wall, with a golden satellite twitching endlessly back and forth far down below it.
“Good night, Father,” she said again. “Good night, dear.”
It was like talking to the dead.
Shawn felt a curious sense of irritability. He realized his nerves must be on edge. He wanted to bang his fist down suddenly, or raise his voice to the rapt man and shout, She’s talking to you; don’t you hear her? Anything to jolt him out of his hypnotic reverie. He controlled the impulse; got up slowly and needled his upper lip with the edge of his teeth.
He put a hand to Reid’s shoulder to attract his attention. Reid tore his eyes from the clock, looked around blankly. He had to look at the hand first to see what it was that had touched him; then at their faces, to see who it was that was with him.
She bent and kissed him lightly on the forehead.
“Until tomorrow.”
“Until—” He didn’t finish it. Stopped, as thou
gh the omitted word bore intrinsic pain.
Shawn went with her as far as the outer side of the doorway. She turned there, and pressed his hand with sudden, unexpected fervency. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For being here. For my being here.” She veiled her eyes momentarily. “Last night at about this same time, I was getting into the car, alone, out there in front of the door—”
He passed over that. “Try to get some sleep.”
“I will. Tonight I’ll be able to.” She glanced past him into the room she had just left. Reid was looking at the clock again. That was the only thing there was in the whole world, for him. “Talk to him,” she said in an undertone. “That’s why I’m going up ahead. Two men, when they’re left alone, sometimes can manage to—The heart opens to its own kind. Even a daughter is on the other side of the fence.” She released his hand with a final pressure of entreaty. “Talk to him, see what you can do— Keep him alive. As you kept me alive. Good night and God bless you.”
“Sleep sound,” he said after her.
He watched her midway up the stairs. Then when the ceiling-tilt had shorn her head off, he quietly closed the door.
“Mr. Reid.”
His heart must have been beating in time with that clop-clop, swish-swish, clop-clop, up there; he couldn’t hear anything else.
“Mr. Reid, don’t. Don’t do that so much.”
He made noises with a bottle and glasses, purposely.
“How about a nightcap?”
He was talking to himself, in an empty room.
“Here, take this.”
He had to take up the hand, and bring it around, and pry the fingers back; then shape them closed again about the glass.
The glass slowly tilted, the level of its contents slid toward the downward rim, flushed over, began to run down.
“Raise it. Raise it with me.”
He had to take Reid’s head and turn it toward himself, to break the electric voltage of that steady stare. Only then did the eyes forgo the clock, because their sockets had been drawn around out of range.
Shawn raised his glass. He kicked it off against the other one with force enough almost to drive it out of Reid’s insensate grasp. “Here’s to crime,” he said with husky-throated defiance.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes Page 17
