Another period of silence ensued. Dobbs’s hand lay fallow, except when he consulted phosphorescent numerals on his wrist.
At 9:12 a man coughed.
At 9:14 a newspaper crackled.
At 9:16 a pipe bowl was tapped out.
At 9:17 a chair creaked in dislodgment.
At 9:19 more water was heard to cascade, this time with greater resonance and at a greater distance. Dobbs’s hand went up in the dark and pulled at an imaginary chain. Sokolsky nodded in judicious agreement.
At 9:20 a shoe struck flooring.
At 9:20:15 a second one followed.
At 9:21 the paring of light at the pipe base went out.
At 9:22 bedsprings creaked.
At 9:24 they creaked once more, but far more lightly, in final adjustment.
After that, nothing. The night wore on. At midnight Sokolsky took over the headset and the pencil and the pad.
All he got was silence. The silence of a sleeper’s room.
“A full twenty-four hours now, lieutenant. No one’s been near him yet. He just comes in, sleeps, goes out, comes in, and sleeps all over again. All we get is background music; we haven’t even once heard the sound of his voice. No one’s shown up, not a soul.”
“Someone will. Someone’s got to.”
“No room’s ever been listened to before like we’re listening to this room now. I haven’t been out in hours. Dobbs brings in our food when he’s taking a relief. I eat right at the set.”
“Don’t let those ear pieces grow cold. I don’t want ’em off your heads. Just listen. Aid if there’s nothing to listen to, keep on listening to that nothing. I want every creak of the floorboards. I want every nibble a mouse takes at the molding in the middle of the night!”
“I wish a mouse would. That would break the monotony. We haven’t even got them to listen to.”
“You’ll get your mouse, Sokolsky. But it won’t have a long tail.”
11
The Wait:
Farewell to Sunlight
SHAWN WAS COMING BACK TOWARD the house from a tour of inspection with the man in charge of the detail guarding it. The afternoon light was coppery in the west, igniting the windowpanes on that side of the house, and every tree and every bump, and the men themselves, sent long spindling blue shadows slanting the other way, toward the east. Like direction finders pointing at night.
They stopped just below the entrance lions to part company. “McManus worked it out himself,” the man said. “We’ve got the place completely ringed, in three separate circuits. The road that comes up here is blocked off at both ends. Nothing on wheels is allowed to get by, and there’s a car patrolling it. There’s a line of men all around the borders of the estate. You can’t see them, but all someone has to do is try to trespass, enter the grounds from the public domain on the outside, and he’ll find out they’re there. Then on the grounds themselves, I have them spotted all over at strategic intervals, wherever there’s any cover. Where there are trees, like in back there—”
“Yeah, those trees have been bothering me,” Shawn admitted. “They still are.”
“You can quit worrying. Nothing can get through them without being seen. Without being stopped. Each man is near enough to be able to see as far as where the next man is. They’re all armed, and if anything moves they’ve got orders to shoot first and then find out what it was they were shooting at later. Then finally, as soon as it’s dark, I’m going to have two men pacing the outside of the house all night long, right up against the walls. They’ll keep moving in opposite directions, meeting at the front, meeting at the back, reversing each time. So don’t try to come out of the door without giving warning, once it’s fully dark, or you’re liable to get accidentally potted. Is there anything more foolproof than that? Can you think of a thing that’s been left out?”
“Not a thing,” Shawn agreed. “When McManus does things, he does them right. Don’t forget the signal, in case something goes wrong on the inside.”
“A light going around in a circle behind one of the windows. Any window at all. We close in on the double, with our guns ready. I’ll be down there where I showed you, all night long— Somebody’s coming out.”
“All right, get back,” Shawn said hastily.
A coppery sheen blurred the glass in the front door as it swung outward, and Jean appeared, her arms double-linked to one of her father’s, supporting him. She was without a coat, but he had a herringbone topcoat thrown over his shoulders, sleeves dangling empty.
For a moment Shawn thought they were contemplating a flight from the house itself, and he scissored hastily up the steps toward them, arms half extended ready to bar their way and shepherd them back inside again.
“Where are you—?”
“He—he wanted to see the setting sun,” she explained. “To say good-bye,” Reid whispered forlornly, “before it goes down.”
Shawn glanced aside at it uncomprehendingly for a moment, his face glinting orange as he turned. His recent respite with his fellow police officer, brief as it had been, had restored his own outlook so completely to normal, it took him a second or two to recapture Reid’s macabre meaning.
“It’ll be back again tomor—”
“But not for me. This is my last look. I’ll never see it again.”
Shawn’s eye caught hers. Let him, she indicated with a pleading little quirk of her head.
“All right, come on out here,” he acquiesced. “You can get a good clear look at it from the lawn, out here in front.” He took hold of him by the other arm, supported him on the opposite side from her.
“No,” Reid said. “There’s a rise over that way. To the back of the house, way over in that direction. Remember it, Jean? If we go up on that, that would make it last longer. You can see down around you on all sides from there.”
“But that’s pretty far out, isn’t it? That’s pretty far away from the house. Are you sure you—?”
“Let me go,” Reid whimpered abjectly. “Let me go over there and see it. I can make it if the two of you will help me. Don’t take this away from me.”
Again she gave Shawn that signal of poignant indulgence.
“All right,” he said.
They took him and trundled him between them diagonally across the close-cut plushy sward, until that had ended and the house lay well behind them, a bonfire in every window. Then over rougher ground, and beginning to tilt upward, they moiled. And he, of the three of them, strained farthest forward, his legs pistoning abortively, often, without gaining ground of their own efforts. Like a caterpillar without a very good grip.
“Hurry,” he urged. “It’s getting redder all the time. It goes fast, once it gets this far down.”
“We’ll get there in time,” she soothed.
They skirted the belt of trees that Shawn didn’t like, trees that seemed lifeless. You couldn’t have told that anyone was in there. Just black tines of shadow, like pitchforks, all over the ground.
But it was gaining on them, it was going down faster than they were going up. The perfect roundness of its lower rim blunted, then flattened out, like a balloon that hits the ground, and then sits on it heavier and heavier.
It became a severed hemisphere, bloodying everything around it with its own flow of life fluid; their hands and their faces, and the ground under them, and even the sky immediately around it. It was like a solar hemorrhage.
Then the effusion began to coagulate, drain off into nowhere. The upper rim was all that showed now, like a scimitar peering over the crest up which they were toiling.
“It’s not really gone yet,” Reid panted, as though his life depended on it. “It’s the hill cuts it off. When we get up on top of that, it’ll last a little longer.”
He writhed forward between them, as though his bodily contortions and not their footwork could accelerate their climb.
They reached the top at last. It wasn’t very high. But it was high enough at sunset to blot out an earthbound sun. The smothe
red globe was disinterred, came clear again, intact in its roundness. It sent a coppery-gold blast full in their faces that all but blinded them for a few moments.
Shawn, squinting painfully away from it, saw Reid tilt his face blissfully toward it, eyes closed; as if breathing it in, as if bathing his face in it; as if what it exuded was the essence of life itself. As in fact it was, Shawn had to admit.
“Its lower rim is still clear,” Reid exulted. “There’s a sliver of sky left under it. It’s still whole.”
It touched. It was so light, so furiously gaseous, almost they expected to see it bounce slightly, rebound, before settling finally against the earth’s surface.
“It rushes downward so fast,” he mourned. “Right while you look at it it moves.”
He shrugged off their double grip on him, freed his arms. He held out his hands toward it, making a circle of them that did not quite join, as if trying to hold it fast between them, get it to stay, keep it up. It must have slipped through his fingers, though their eyes couldn’t focus it where his did, between his curved hands; for to each of them it was in a different place: directly before himself. It must have slipped through his grasp, little by little, escaping irretrievably downward; for they saw him convulsively expand and contract his hands several times, the way a clumsy person would fumble trying to hold onto a slippery ball that has just been thrown to him. Then they came together, palm to palm, over emptiness, and he let them drop, frustrated.
“Good-bye,” he sobbed softly. “Good-bye.”
Shawn stole at look at Jean. Her face was impassive, peach-flushed in the reflection. A shiny thread, like a metallic wire, lay flat on her motionless face, from eye corner to mouth corner.
He looked away again. He hadn’t meant to spy on her reaction. He thought, There is no consolation for what he is feeling, nothing to be said, nothing to be done. For if I thought that was my last sun, I’d be as he is now—and maybe worse.
It was gone now. The emanation it had left behind was like an open fan, with luminous ribs striking up the evening sky. And as if the fan were being closed by a submerged hand, the ribs shortened, drew downward into a common focal point just under the joining line of earth and sky. Only a little aftershine was left now, holding its own a moment, then finally swallowed by the merging tides of blue and chilly gray.
He shivered. “It gets so cold the minute it’s gone. Do you feel that wind? That’s night breathing on us.”
He stole a glance behind him. “There’s one of them out already. See it over there? Hurry up, let’s get back. Quick, before any more—”
They turned and started down the rise, face forward into the dark tide flushing from the east. He strained forward between them, as though he were off balance and pulling them after him in a long, stumbling fall, head apprehensively low to keep from looking upward at the first stab of cold brilliance knifing through the darkening sky as if ready to plunge through full-blade and slash down at him.
And fast as they went, he careened faster still, legs at times almost seeming to paddle air without touching the ground they scurried over. They swerved from side to side, supporting him between them, in triple headlong flight.
“Faster,” he panted. “Faster. Hurry up inside, where they can’t follow us. More of them are starting to come out every minute. Don’t look at them, don’t look. Keep your eyes away.”
They tottered across the level space of the lawn, and around to the foot of the paved walk, and sped up that to the sanctuary of the waiting entrance. One leg now was trailing out uselessly behind him, as they bore him forward. They vanished.
His voice sounded strangledly somewhere just inside.
“Close it! Close it tight!”
Someone reached out and slammed the door.
Behind them it was night.
12
Police Procedure:
Molloy
“INSPECTOR? MOLLOY, INSPECTOR.”
(staccato) “What’ve you got? Got something? What is it?”
“I’m on lions, you know. You gave me sort of a blanket—”
(irritably) “I know what I gave you. And when I gave it to you— two days ago! What you’re giving me is what I want to hear.”
“Yes, sir. Well, first I made sure of all the usual lions we know about. Then I got onto this. There’s a small traveling tent show, sort of a peanut carnival, been working its way slowly across state up here. It was at Hampton when word reached me about it. That was about three yesterday afternoon. I started for there right away, but by the time I got there, what with engine trouble and a couple of flat shoes one right after the other, I was too late—”
The soles of the sheriff’s shoes made a V atop his desk. This split at Molloy’s entrance and his face came through inquiringly. It was raw-looking, as though it had been freshly peeled.
“Do for you?” he said somewhat curtly, as one who has a position in authority to uphold.
The curtness disappeared at sight of Molloy’s credentials, and what was intended for amiability, though it bore an equal resemblance to mere lethargy, succeeded it. “Don’t often get you fellows up here,” he said with slothlike pace of utterance. “Have a chair. Take a load off your—”
Molloy’s question punched a hole in the fabric of unhurried sociability he was trying to spin. He looked slightly rueful for a minute at such haste between fellow police officials, then answered it.
“Yes, we had a traveling ruckus with us last night. I took my two kids and the missus. We let them pitch in that big lot next to the Methodis’ church. They paid the usual fee for it, of course.” He chewed something, probably something that was nonexistent, over to one side of his mouth. “In advance,” he added.
“That big open place—? It’s empty now, I just came by there.”
“Oh, sure. They pulled up stakes right after the last customer was out, ’bout midnight. By one o’clock this morning they was already on the move. See, we told them, the way we run things, they would have had to pay for a second day’s use of the lot, starting in at midnight, if they was still on the ground.”
Molloy brushed this rather inhospitable local ordinance aside. “I was told they had some wild animals with them.”
“Had a few. No great shakes,” the sheriff said, with the pursed expression of one who has seen better in his time. “They sure smelled strong. Made up in smell for what they lacked in—”
Molloy dusted his knuckles across the desktop. “Any lions? That’s what I want to know.”
“Yeah, two. A pair. Both in the same cage. Male and female, I guess. One of ’em had one of these ruffs around its neck, one of ’em didn’t. Dunno what good they were; didn’t perform or anything. They were just shown off in the cage. Just slept there, chins to floor, through the whole show. They had a little trained zebra, now, that earned his keep. Took the kids for a ride, two at a time—”
Molloy swerved, so that from the shoulders down he was already facing the door, though from the shoulders up he continued to face his slow-spoken informant. “Where was their next pitch to be?”
“I don’t rightly recall that they told anyone. Just picked up quietly and left.”
Molloy was at the door now, as one who realizes that the only way to conclude a current conversation is to move bodily away from it, until the sound can no longer reach him and therefore it automatically expires. “Well, which way’d they go, which road’ they take?”
“Well, there’s only one,” the sheriff had to admit. “It comes in from the direction of Fairfield and goes out again in the direction of Hanoveria. I know they didn’t pass my house on the way out, because we was up; one of the kids had a bellyache from too much—”
“They wouldn’t go back and rework pitches they already worked,” Molloy told him. “Which way’d they come in from?”
“Fairfield,” the sheriff told him.
“What’s along it going the other way? What’s the first place you hit they’d be likely to make a stop?”
&n
bsp; “That’s Hanoveria, like I told you.”
Molloy returned to the desk again, conversational obstacle notwithstanding. “Can I use your phone?” He picked it up without waiting. The sheriff looked slightly worried. He even batted his eyes off at a directional angle a couple of times, as though calculating rates.
Molloy hung up again presently. “Hanoveria says they passed through there about dawn this morning, without stopping. Traveling slow. What’s the next—?”
The sheriff this time looked positively alarmed. He even edged the phone a little farther over on the desk. Away from Molloy. “Maybe you better— Did you come up by car?”
“It’s outside. Yeah, maybe I better head after them myself,” Molloy agreed. He started for the door.
The sheriff cleared his throat on a note that was almost physically arresting, there was such poignant anxiety in it.
“I don’t like to mention it but—you know how it is—you might be up this way again and then again you mightn’t.”
“Oh,” Molloy said, catching on. “Oh. How much was the phone call?” He was too taken aback even to be sore about it.
“Well, it’s seventy-five from here to Hanoveria, on the first three minutes—
Molloy fumbled in his pants pocket, shied a bill toward the desk that fell short. “Keep the change. Nice business you’ve got here.” The door closed after him.
The sheriff might have been a slow talker, but he was a fast mover. He was already crouched down below the gap in the middle of his desk, reaching forward through it on hands and knees, before Molloy’s hand had even come away from the outside knob.
Molloy got back into the same car that had just brought him, still sweating at the seams from the trip up, and took the road to Hanoveria and parts beyond. A shift of the gears, a half turn on the tires—or so it seemed—and Hampton was already rearward of him, so small was it.
The road was dappled in the late-afternoon sunlight, and the landscape tranquil enough to have been a colored magazine layout advertising tractors or dairy products. Whipped-cream clouds were splashed up against the pottery-blue sky, and cows stood by fences and raised their heads at him as he whirred by. It was a shame to be carrying thoughts of danger through such a scene, even locked in your own head.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes Page 23
