He thought she’d go home now, after being shaken out of her reverie. She went at first in that general direction, then, diverging suddenly when almost back there, went aside the space of a street or two, until she had come to a church. One that was evidently known to her, for it was small and inconspicuous, and its presence otherwise could not have been guessed from a distance.
She went slowly up the few brief steps, opened the small door set within the massive large one, and disappeared inside.
When he reached it he hesitated only momentarily. He would not have gone in if it had had only the one entrance. But it was on a corner plot, it fronted two ways, and there was a side entrance farther down. Unsure that she was unaware of him, and this was merely a subterfuge to slip out at the side while he waited at the front, he went in himself.
He hadn’t been in one since he was a boy. The silence immediately abashed him, though he had been in many silent places since then. But this was silence with a meaning. He couldn’t remember any of the proper things to do on entering such a place, or if there were any, except to take his hat off, and he did that.
He crossed the empty vestibule and entered the second door, as she must have before him. He softened its closing with one hand, and stood there by it.
He saw her. She was far down ahead, at the end of the aisle, on her knees before the altar rail. A small huddled shape. The candles were like clusters of white daisies glimmering in a dark-blue meadow. The imaged face of the Mother holding the Child, inclined downward from on high, was palely revealed from below, in a sort of indirect luminousness. Even at the distance at which he stood, its brooding aura of saddened, merciful compassion could be felt, seemed to reach out toward him, as if trying to soften him. In his heart he could almost hear the tender burden of its entreaty: Let her be; let her be.
His hand went to his collar and sought to ease it.
They were alone. There was no hunter and no hunted now. The laws on the outside had stopped short at the door. And if there was a transgressor between the two of them, it was he and not she, that sorrowing face up there seemed to caution. For she had come in trouble, and he had come to inflict it.
He shook his head, as though the impression disconcerted him.
She rose and moved back along the aisle. He stayed there motionless, invisible against the black lining of the door. She entered one of the pews and sank down again, her head scarcely visible against the pallid candle glow beyond it.
He moved aside, entered one of the rearmost pews. He crouched down on one knee, let his hat fall, clasped his hands against the back of the pew before him, inclined his head. He watched her through the seams of his fingers. They were still, the watcher and the watched. There is no time in a church; the minutes and the hours had been left behind at the door.
Her head rose at last, and she came out into the aisle again. She dipped her knee briefly and made the sign of the cross altar-ward, then came up it, past where he knelt, blurred in the dimness. She didn’t look at him; his face could have been uncovered, turned her way, and she would not have seen him.
She opened the door and went out.
He made the sign of the cross. He did it in the furtive way of a person ashamed of himself.
He rose and went out after her.
He put his hat on and held his head low for a time, hunched over, as if weighted with an intangible guilt, on the streets outside.
She was becoming aware of him. She stopped twice, but without looking around. Rather in the way of a person listening to, or feeling something, within them.
Then she turned suddenly and started back directly toward him. He had grown careless, the surroundings were unpropitious, and he was badly caught. There was no time to turn back. The duplication of her own turn would have caught her eye, carried its own message, if his presence hadn’t already. There was no sideward escape, no doorways to veer off into. They were beside a blank stretch of industrial wall, fencing some sort of yards.
He continued onward; there was nothing else he could do. Their paths would cross, they would reverse themselves, he thought; he go forward of her, she back of him.
Instead she stopped as they reached each other.
“You’re not following me, are you?” Her voice had in it a forlorn, almost abject plea for reassurance. It wasn’t an accusation, it was as though she were baffled and seeking help of the first passer-by she happened to encounter.
“No, miss, I’m not,” he said quite simply, though his cheeks tightened a little. “I’m going up this way, you’re going down that.”
She nodded. “I knew you weren’t,” she mused sadly. “I knew I was mistaken.” She backed her hand distressedly to her forehead. “All day long I’ve been thinking—”
“I haven’t seen you until this minute.”
“I know you haven’t. And I haven’t seen you. I don’t know what made me do that.” There was something childlike in her helplessness.
He went on.
She went on.
He stopped, looked back, swearing soundlessly between his clenched teeth.
Then he turned, started after her once more, his anonymity riddled. He’d have to be switched, he was no good for his purpose any longer.
The lighted motion-picture marquee threw a yellow glare over her as she drifted under it. She didn’t seem to see it until she was already overstepping it at its far side, and darkness had begun to run down her back again like a spreading stain. Then she turned, and looked up overhead to see what it was. Then noting what it was, and as though it hadn’t occurred to her until just then that there could be such a place, she opened her bag and plumbed it, as if to see whether she had money. Then she went over to the little glass kiosk and bought admission. Then she rounded it to the back and went in. All this without the barest glance at the advertising so lavishly displayed all about her, in lighted lettering above and in lighted glass-covered panels on both sides of her. As though the fact of gaining entrance, and not the presentation, was the motive of her entering.
A moment later he had bought a ticket in turn. He crossed the empty vestibule, gave the ticket to the taker at the door, plunged into green-tinged darkness, that rippled a little along the walls, as though there were glistening water at hand somewhere nearby.
A pocket light went on, drawing a sort of tracer for him across the gloom, and brass buttons peered dimly just behind it. “Which seat did that girl take who came in just ahead of me? The last one through the door there, just now.”
The usherette bridled. “Are you with her?” she asked suspiciously.
“Never mind that, I’m not a masher.” He palmed his badge underneath her downpointed torch. “Hurry up. Where’d she go?”
“In there.” She pointed toward a door on the opposite side of the foyer from the orchestra seats. It didn’t show in the darkness. A lighted indicator of orange glass was the only thing that showed it was there.
“Oh,” was all he said, and remained where he was.
Two spectators entered. The usherette left his side, guided them through a gap in the head-high partition backing the rows of seats. The faces of all three of them took on a palely green cast as they turned forward through it and passed from view.
He kept looking at the door.
The usherette returned. It was the back of her head that had the pale-greenish cast now.
“Is there anyone in there?” he asked. “Posted in there, I mean?”
“There’s a matron.”
“Oh,” he said.
Another pair of spectators entered, on a full-voiced wrangling note, quickly quelled as the silencing darkness welled over them.
“—it’s already half over.”
“—well, you had to stay and wash the dishes; you couldn’t do that when we come home.”
“Sh,” the usherette reminded them tactfully.
She went with them. She came back alone.
A volley of shots rang out from the screen, and he nervously gave a slight jump,
then looked back at the door again.
“It’s taking her— Go in there a minute. Take a look in there for me.”
She obediently started lengthwise along the foyer. She never got to the other side of it. A muffled scream rang out, somewhere behind a door. The quavering scream of an elderly woman. Then there was an impact, as though a heavy chair had overturned.
An orange split suddenly ran down under the indicator, as though a hidden spring had been set off freeing the stubbornly closed door. The head of a white-haired woman peered out; a flailing arm accompanied it, turning the usherette around and sending her flying back the other way.
A hoarse whisper slashed after her: “Get the manager! Get the manager! Something’s happened in here!”
He sprinted forward, as the usherette passed him, going the opposite way. Even as he ran, he knew there was now no reason to hurry.
9
The Wait:
Deeps of Night
REID WAS HASTILY PACKING BELONGINGS into a bloated, sausagelike white shape that resembled a duffel bag.
“Hurry!” she kept whispering fearfully, peering out through hangings that lined the entire inside wall surface of the alcove or chamber they were in. “Hurry!”
They were in the dark, and yet she could see his every movement. It was as though some indirect light were playing upon him from below, or perhaps from above, creating a sort of incandescent twilight effect.
And each time she’d whisper that urgent “Hurry!” he’d whisper back, “I can’t go without my muffler” or “I can’t go without my tablets,” and put something more into the overfilled bag.
Suddenly a man stuck his head in, close to her own face. The hangings seemed to be like ribbons, that could be parted almost at will anywhere. It was Shawn. The suddenness of it didn’t frighten her; her fright was for other things, of other things.
“You haven’t much time,” he warned them ominously. “You’d better be quick.”
“Father, do you hear what he says?” she implored.
Reid looked up from the bag. “I can’t go without my knitted vest,” he said inflexibly.
Shawn’s head withdrew as suddenly as it had projected itself. He wasn’t out there any more.
She turned and ran to her father and wrung her hands at him. “He won’t wait, if you take much longer. He may be gone already. He may throw the assignment over and leave us by ourselves in here.”
He was fastening the neck of the bag. “Now! I’m ready,” he said at last.
She took him by the hand and they started to tread warily forward toward the hangings, he trailing the duffel bag after him in turn. It held them back, it was like an anchor.
“We’ll have to go faster than this, even to get out to the other side of those hangings,” she admonished him.
She fumbled with them, the slits, a moment ago so profuse. Now they eluded her.
Suddenly Shawn’s head reappeared. But this time behind them, all the way over at the opposite side of the alcove.
“Not that way,” he warned tautly. “This way. You can’t go out that way any more. There’s one of them out there, lurking in wait.”
They knew what he meant by them; a cold thrill ran through her. She and Reid both recoiled violently at the last moment, as though even to have touched the hangings on that side would have been dangerous.
They recrossed to his side. His hand made a part in the hangings, and they lowered their heads and passed through. She noted a police shield affixed to the palm of it as they went, like a sort of talisman of safety, good, however, only at very close range like that.
But as they came to the outside, he went in through the hangings to the inside, to where they had been before. He and they had changed sides.
“Aren’t you coming with us?”
“You go along the outside passage,” he said. “I’ll keep up with you along the inside, underneath the hangings. If you get frightened along the way, reach in through the openings and you’ll be able to touch me, you’ll know that I’m there.”
The hangings, accordingly, seemed to have altered configuration; they were now no longer arranged foursquare around an enclosed alcove, they ran in a straight line along the passage they were to follow to eventual egress and safety, forming a partition between him and themselves. This insidious change did not frighten her in the least; there was still only one thing that could frighten her.
The passage they had now embarked on was remotely recognizable as one of the familiar halls of the house, but all similarity of proportion, particularly as to length, had disappeared. It was grotto-dim, like the other place had been, and yet every fold in the hangings was visible.
“It’s so long,” she complained as they strove onward. “It wasn’t this long when we came along it earlier today, it’s grown longer since.”
“That’s because we were going the other way then,” her father whispered. “It always seems longer when you’re going out than when you’re coming in.”
They advanced for long moments more, and still no end appeared in sight. Her courage began to fail her at last. “Shawn,” she called hoarsely. “Shawn. Are you in there? Are you keeping up with us?”
Instantly his hand reached out and took hers, and she could feel the police badge still set into its palm when she clasped it, and she felt better.
Then he let go again and they went on.
The passage had altered again, with that optical fluidity that all her surroundings seemed sensitized to, as if projected through water running down the face of a mirror. There was a turn down at the end now, and too late she became aware of a faint pale-green reflection playing upon the columnar folds and corrugations of the hangings, coming from some cause out of sight beyond that turn. Lethal it was and impalpable, the faintest of luminous traces. Seeing it had brought the menace into being; it was as if had they turned their backs and fled away from it before seeing it they would still have retained immunity.
But it was too late now. Awareness had brought the peril to a head. And with continued awareness it elongated, was drawn forth from its anonymous obscurity. The original of the reflected glow came into being. Two livid eyes, drawn into baleful slits, and glowing a rabid green. Set into the spade-shaped cat head. Small pointed ears lying flat with vengeful imminence of attack. Jaws wide and studded with fangs, and a livid red line bordering them, almost like a glowing neon outline.
It was low to the floor, crouched in threat to spring. And behind it came the sinuosity of its body. It was reptilian, almost, rather than leonine. Its head was the only definite attribute of the lion. It was a dragon body, belly-low, swirling concentrically, straddling foreshortened outward-bent legs, tail lashing maniacally back in the infinite distance.
They turned and fled, minds needled, legs leaden and unmanageable. “Let go, let go that bag,” she panted. “It’s holding us back.”
He released it and it rolled backward, as if carried by gravity into that charcoal-glowing maw. Just before it disappeared, it browned over evenly, as if slowly scorching and about to be consumed.
Again the escape passage betrayed them; again a liquefied turn developed in it. Again that pale-green phosphorescence, the first warning, sicklied the hangings. Again the thought was father to the horror, materializing it into the visible and tactile. Again the head slithered forward, bared fangs to floor. But it was not the same one. Behind them there was still the other, sidling after them with undulant implacability.
They were blocked now at both ends.
“Let go of me,” her father pleaded. “I’m holding you back now.”
“No,” she gasped, “no!” And pinioned his arm tighter to her by locking her own over it, pressed to her side.
“Shawn?” she cried out desperately. “Shawn!”
His voice sounded, in even-toned remonstrance. “There was a time you weren’t afraid,” he said, as if instructing her what to say.
She tried to repeat it, but the words wouldn’t come. “Shawn!” sh
e screamed.
“Just say it after me. ‘There was a time you weren’t afraid.’ That’ll save you.”
She plunged her hand between the hangings. There was no answering hand to meet it. He wasn’t in there, where he’d said he’d be.
Slowly, like flickering gaslight, that same telltale onset of fetid metamorphosis began to peer through the gap the insertion of her hand had created. A little of it even bathed her wrist. There was one of them in there too, creeping along between the hangings and the wall like some sort of giant vermin.
She whipped her hand out again, as if fearful of having it mauled, as if the advancing light itself could have developed teeth and bitten while it illumined.
She turned in terror to her father. “He’s gone! I couldn’t say the words he wanted me to!”
He wasn’t there either. She’d lost him now. In ghastly, unguessed dismemberment carried out behind her very back. The arm that she clung to, pressed beneath her own, was all that remained. She could see his other hand reach upward in despairing futility far back within the luminous maw behind her. Then it sank downward out of sight.
Her screams came loud and full now, taking on a new quality of voice that rang in her own ears. As if before they had been simply thought rather than vocally uttered. She began to beat violently at the hangings on all sides of her, trying to discover Shawn, to go through them to him.
Something like the windshield wiper of a car at work upon the clouded pane through which she, the beholder, gazed began to switch restlessly back and forth, scythelike across the area of vision. Invisible itself, only its effects could be detected. At each stroke it made the lens it acted upon grow clearer, and clearer, and then clearer still. All the dark colors lost body, paled into daylight. As if it were scouring them, rubbing them out.
The sable hangings had bleached to white, had bunched into squared compact masses. Her screams thinned, faded into distances of the soul. “Shawn,” she was whimpering under her breath, “Shawn.” And pummeling despairingly at her pillows.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes Page 21
