Lay On, Mac Duff!

by Charlotte Armstrong

“Mind the cook,” I whispered thinly, and Hugh jumped and hissed at me for silence.

  We crept down the hall. There was a little entryway under the street steps and therefore two doors here, too. Hugh bent his thread against the inner door. No draft here either. It was done.

  We crept silently back the way we’d come, up the long stairs, three flights to go, and only on the second floor was I very frightened. I couldn’t help wondering what my uncle was doing beyond those papered walls. Hugh said, “I’ll wake you. Do you wake easily?”

  “I hope so,” I moaned.

  “Open the window toward my room.”

  “Why?”

  “If I have to I can get across that way, using the fire escape.”

  “Oh, I’ll wake,” I promised quickly. “I’m sure I will. I wouldn’t miss it. If you don’t mind, I won’t open the fire-escape window. I’d … rather not.”

  “Of course,” he said, quickly, “and thanks. Thanks a lot.”

  “I suppose you’re really doing this for me,” I whispered back. “So I should thank you, and I do.”

  “We’re partners,” he said, smiling. I guess my window face must have become particularly transparent at that because he proceeded to read my mind. “Have you known that Jones boy very long?” he said. His hand was on my bathrobed shoulder, and I bristled under it.

  “Why?”

  He took his hand away. But I knew I’d told him what a new friend J.J. was. “I’m sorry. I only meant, it’s a good idea to be careful.” His whispered words seemed to hang in the air. He patted my shoulder once and went to his own door. I stood alone in the hall. Then the heavy silence crackled in my ears, and I slipped quickly into the elegant atmosphere I was beginning to get used to, the soft light, the warm fragrant atmosphere of Lina’s best guest room.

  But I wasn’t up to trying the other bed. I crawled into the right-hand one, again. I felt I knew it better.

  As I snapped off the light I saw, with stupid surprise, that it was only 12:35.

  Chapter Eleven

  I woke up suddenly in the dark.

  I was frightened, and I couldn’t think why. Out of the window I had opened I could see somebody else’s lighted window far away and the frail shadow of my curtains shaking to and fro. It was the breeze. It’s the wind, I said to myself, it’s only the wind. And I was sick for home and the wind that blew up our back lot past the barn. I buried my head and pulled the pillow over my eyes, but in a second I sat straight up in bed. Somebody was tapping patiently at my door. Patiently and steadily. Four taps, four taps again, and a listening wait.

  I turned the light on finally. It was two in the morning, if you can call that morning. I called it the very dead of night. Four taps again. I knew they’d go on forever if I didn’t stop them.

  I went across the floor in my bare feet and said, “Who is it?”

  A voice like a sigh said, “Hugh.”

  “For heaven’s sake!” I said to the blank door angrily. I was angry because I’d been so scared. I got my slippers and bathrobe on and closed the window. The room was cold. “What’s the matter?” I whispered, pushing a barricading chair aside and opening the door.

  He wore a dark bathrobe. His pajama legs were too short and his ankles looked white and bony, descending into sheepskin slippers. His hair was awry, a thin strand fell over his eyeglasses. “It’s two o’clock!” I said, sounding shocked.

  “I know,” he whispered and turned his head stiffly as if to listen behind and below. “I’ve been trying to wake you for half an hour.”

  “Why?”

  “Somebody …” he began and stopped. “I heard a kind of echo up the back of the house. I don’t know.”

  “Were you asleep?”

  “Yes, but I woke again, and then I … I can’t sleep any more. Will you go with me?”

  “What?”

  “Downstairs.”

  “The doors?”

  He nodded, still with that listening angle to his neck.

  “If I come now,” I said, “you won’t have to wake me again?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Then let’s look and get it over,” I said, shivering. “But if someone—”

  “If someone hears us, whichever one of us who can must hide.” I must have looked blank. “You mustn’t be found prowling around at night … with me, I mean.”

  “No. Oh, no, of course not. I …”

  “It’s so important,” he said. “If I could do it alone … but, don’t you see, I mightn’t be believed. And I can’t ask anybody but you.” Then he said suddenly, almost out loud, “Go back to bed. What am I thinking of? I’m terribly sorry.”

  “Why, I’m awake now,” I said.

  “No. If he did go out, suppose he comes back?”

  “We’d hear.”

  “It’s too risky for you.”

  “But I live here,” I said stubbornly. “And, if he has gone out, I’d certainly like to know it.”

  “We’d better drop the whole thing.”

  “No,” I said, “but let’s not argue. That’s risky.”

  I no more wanted to creep down all those stairs again than I wanted to fly off to the moon, but I wasn’t going to climb back to bed and lie there awake and wondering for the rest of the night. I yanked the cord on my bathrobe good and tight. “I wouldn’t go down there alone for a million dollars,” I said, “but come on.”

  He seemed to know I meant it, and we started down again, down that soft carpeted spiral. At the curve I put my hand out and stopped him. “Wait. Can’t you see from your room? Is there a light in his?”

  “There’s a light,” he said promptly, “but no … no movement.” His pale face was turned up to me anxiously. “Shall we go back? Please, if you’re frightened …”

  I had a vision of an empty lighted room. I began to believe my uncle wasn’t in the house. I felt calmer with that thought, for, if my uncle wasn’t there, no one who caught us could matter much.

  “We’ll just look,” I whispered.

  The library was dark as before. Our steps were as silent. The hall, when we got there, was incredibly just the same. Hugh bent over the doorsill and turned his tiny flashlight on. The thread was in place, just as we’d left it. He straightened and looked at me.

  “The basement,” I whispered. He started to protest. “What’s the use if we don’t look there, too?” I insisted.

  In the little square room where the basement stairs began, the small light was burning as before. Hugh hesitated at the top of the stairs, and I, held behind him, waiting for him to move, saw the beam of his little light go on, saw it lift and waver and go off to our right where the coat rack was.

  My heart jumped as Hugh said, “Coat!” and moving together as if we were in the same dream, we went closer. The camel’s hair was there, and Hugh’s coat. But they were all.

  My uncle’s warm dark woolen coat was gone.

  I put my hand on the camel’s hair, on Hugh’s coat, as if to count them. Hugh said, “Well, his coat’s there.”

  “But it isn’t,” I said.

  “What!” Hugh ran his hand nervously through his hair to push it back. “How do you know?”

  “I saw them. There were three.”

  “When?”

  “B-before.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Of course, tonight,” I hissed at him.

  “I wish I’d noticed.”

  “Well, I did. And it’s gone.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. You brushed against them yourself.”

  “I didn’t notice,” he said dumbly. He seemed quite paralyzed. He just stood there.

  “We’ve got more stairs,” I said. “Oh, hurry …”

  I went down those basement stairs first myself with Hugh’s little light trembling over my shoulder. I went down with my toes curled up the way one walks on ice without rubbers. The passage was long, and at the end of it, when we crouched to see, there was no thread at all.

  �
��Where?” I breathed. I felt rather than saw his shoulders move in a shrug. We turned back and Hugh held my arm tight. He guided me away from the stairs into the continuing passage, through a door into a funny little pantry, into the kitchen, where white handles on the gas stove gleamed and the sink was a slab of pale light across the darkness. Hugh sent his flash around until he found a light switch.

  “Oh, don’t!”

  “No one can know we’re here,” he said, still whispering, however. “I’m not going to leave you for a little while. You look ill.”

  “I’m all right.” I swallowed.

  “Sit down.” I sat on a hard kitchen chair, and my teeth rattled. “I’m going to make some coffee.”

  “You can’t!” I cried if one can cry in a whisper. “It smells!”

  “Tea, then, if I can find it.”

  “I don’t want any tea. I wish I were in bed. I think we ought to go upstairs quick as we can.”

  “There are two doors between us and that passage,” Hugh said. “Even if he should come in …”

  “Oh, where did he go?” I moaned.

  “Ssh. Out. At least we know that.”

  “And left the light on,” I said as if that were the iniquity.

  Hugh was poking around in the cupboards, but he couldn’t find any tea. He found some milk, though, in an enormous refrigerator that looked brand new, and a pan to put it in, and began to heat some on the stove.

  “If the cook …? What can we possibly say to explain …?”

  “Say I had a toothache, which God knows is the truth, and asked you to show me where the kitchen was.”

  “This must be a bad night for teeth,” I said idiotically.

  “What?”

  “Oh, Effans, you know?”

  “Didn’t Effans say he used some drops?” I nodded. “I wonder if he’s got any more,” Hugh said.

  “Does it really ache?”

  “That’s what first woke me.”

  “Oh,” I said. It was fantastic, sitting there in that strange enormous kitchen, halfway under the ground, watching him fuss over the milk pan, hugging my knees to quiet their trembling, appreciating with part of my mind how ridiculously out of himself he looked in those fat domestic sheepskin slippers, knowing all the time that I had a sharp worry in the background somewhere though I couldn’t quite bring it into focus.

  “Do you like sugar in it?”

  “My goodness, no!”

  “I used to when I was little.” He brought me the milk. I thought he looked more than ever like an undergraduate, as if this were something one did at school, had things to drink in the middle of the night when one wasn’t supposed to. He almost seemed to enjoy it.

  I drank the milk, rather surprised that it got down all right.

  Hugh swished some of it around in his mouth but said the heat hurt. He told me it was an old filling that had come out and that something dreadful must have gone on underneath because the hole ached like anything. It was the strangest thing, how we were able to sit there and discuss his dental work. As if both our minds took a holiday from wondering and fearing. He asked me if I’d ever had gas, and I began to tell about my wisdom tooth. It was practically the only operation I’d ever had in my life. I whispered the whole story—we were still whispering, of course—and, just as I got to the climax, the place and the time and the circumstance we were in suddenly came true to me.

  “Hugh, what time is it?”

  “Two-thirty,” he said. There was a kitchen clock. My watch agreed with it.

  “We’ve got to—”

  “Wait.” All of a sudden it was back again, the weight of the tall silent house, the necessity for that long spiral climb, the darkness just beyond the kitchen door. Hugh listened, too. “I’d better put this pan and the glasses away.”

  “Don’t run the water,” I warned, thinking of the moaning pipes in the parsonage.

  “No? What shall I do?”

  “Put them in the sink.”

  “All right.” He went shuffling in his sheepskin shoes across the kitchen. I got up. He lifted his head sharply, and I froze. I couldn’t hear anything but a roaring in my ears that must have been my heart. He set the pan and glasses down with infinite care, steadily, softly, and came back to me on silent toes. He reached the switch, the light went out. He put his arm across my shoulders, and I grabbed his bathrobe lapels and hung on. I didn’t dare ask him what. I didn’t dare swallow for fear it would make a noise. In that aching, black, paralyzed stillness we stood for a moment until I began to shake, and he pulled my head close against him. I could hear his heart surging, sounding hideously loud. For another minute we waited. Then he released me, slowly, stiffly.

  “Wait,” he said against my ear.

  I hung on to his lapels.

  “I’ll go see …” I shook my head against him so he could feel what I dared not whisper lest I whispered too loud. He seemed to resign himself then and stood by me until I drew away by myself.

  “Must get back,” I breathed.

  “Stay behind.” He opened the kitchen door. The pantry was dark. We got across it without stumbling. I walked close behind. He opened the door to the passage even more gingerly. The passage was black except for the faintest gleam through the street doors, far at the other end. Hugh risked his little light. No one was there. We moved on to the bottom of the stairs. Hugh stood a while listening. He said, “Stay here. Close to the wall. I must go see …”

  I thought I could better bear the darkness here than coming upon my uncle in the room above. So I let him go. I thought I could run screaming to the cook if indeed there was a real live woman here on this level, asleep in her bed somewhere up front. But suppose I ran screaming to the cook and there was no cook? I should go mad. No, you wouldn’t either go mad, Bessie G., I said to myself with sudden courage. What kind of performance is this?

  Hugh’s little light flashed at the top of the stairs, and I went up quite steadily and easily. He said, “I think he’s in his room. I went as far as the second floor. Let’s go quickly. Are you ready?”

  “The tiny bulb in the cloakroom-pantry seemed terribly bright. Hugh pushed me along as if to hurry me. “Just a minute,” I said. I walked over and put my hand on the soft light camel’s hair, on Hugh’s scratchy tweed, on the warm heavy wool. Yes, it was there. “One,” I said, “two, three. Count, Hugh.”

  “I saw. I must get you upstairs.”

  “What makes you think I’m going to collapse?” I said crossly, and quite unjustly, I realized as I said it. I walked out into the stairwell. Up they wound, those stairs, around and around. The soft treads told me secrets. A man could go up, I thought, as silently as we were going. As silently as we went, me first, until Hugh stumbled on the curve and fell.

  The thump his body made seemed to raise echoes. Sound came back to us from the roof. “Go on, for God’s sake!”

  I went on, strangely steady. But he had heard. As I came to the library doors I heard him coming, and the lights went up. Not the whole truth, I said to myself desperately. The truth but not the whole truth. I come from the country. Oh, please, I do. I turned my head enough to see that Hugh had vanished. I knew he must be crouching somewhere below the turn of the stairs.

  My uncle looked down at me with surprise and amusement in his cold blue eyes.

  “I f-fell,” I whispered. I saw he wore a bathrobe. For my life, I dared not look at his feet.

  “Do you walk in your sleep?” he inquired, using his voice aloud, that baffling, musical voice with overtones that always puzzled me. He seemed to inquire very casually, as if for information.

  I shook my head. “I got some warm milk,” I said weakly. “I couldn’t sleep. Is it all right?”

  Surely the blaze in my uncle’s face was anger. “Don’t be so confoundedly timid, child. Next time ring for the servants.”

  “So late?” I murmured.

  “It would be better than breaking your neck, don’t you think?”

  I stumbled back and he s
tarted forward. I knew he mustn’t come too close to the rail and so see Hugh. I stumbled forward. “Are you hurt?” he said more gently and put his arm around me. In his great chest his heart beat strongly. I could hardly breathe.

  “I’m all right,” I said, “I guess I’m sleepy now.”

  He let me go quickly. “I’ll ring for Ellen.”

  “No, don’t fuss!”

  He surprised me by smiling. “Then promise you won’t go wandering around like this again,” he said almost tenderly. “You may have anything you want, you know, any time, for the asking.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Thank you, Uncle Charles.”

  He sighed. He let the breath out of his big body, as if with regret. “Good night.” His voice held sadness.

  “Oh, good night.” I felt his eyes as I stumbled up the ascending flight. I wondered how cold they were, how calculating? I didn’t dare look back to see. I ran to my room. I shut the door. But I listened for Hugh. Hugh must come up before I was safe. I was not safe yet. My little clock said 2:40. Only ten minutes, all that long slow fearful time, since Hugh put the milk pan down in the kitchen. In less than ten minutes could a man come in and be in his bathrobe? Why, ten minutes was an eternity of time. He might even have taken his shoes off. I hadn’t been able to look. I didn’t know.

  Hugh tapped on my door at 2:44, and this time I let him in.

  He didn’t stay long. I was too jittery. He thought he’d escaped being seen or heard. But we couldn’t be sure. He made me take an aspirin and took two himself, for his tooth, he said. I sat on my bed, and he kept walking around until I was terrified lest my uncle hear his footsteps from below us.

  “It’s this pain,” he said. “Forgive me for all this, will you, Bessie? Go to sleep and rest. You’ll be all right now. We’ll talk it over some other time.”

  “Oh, yes, we must tell J.J. We must tell Mac Duff.”

  “We must indeed,” Hugh said. “Good night.”

  He kissed my hand.

  I watched him go out and simply rolled over into my bed, bathrobe and all, too dumbfounded, too confused, too exhausted to do more than lift a limp hand and turn out the light.

  It was five minutes of three.

  I woke up at noon, and when Ellen brought my tray she told me that Bertram Gaskell had died during the night.