“He’ll be delayed.”
The magazine slid to the floor, each page’s rustle louder than if a tray of dishes had crashed. “Delayed?” Ann’s question was terrored, so soft, softer than a pillow.
Missy looked straight at her, then deliberately giggled, and Ann’s terror was as lightning over her face. Griselda crossed to her, pretending to go nearer the fire, pumping the spirit of her strength into the older sister.
“The business took longer?”
David stilled the fear that was whispering. “Unfortunately yes.”
Ann didn’t say anything.
Griselda went from her again, to the windows where you might see the quiet of the lake. The twins didn’t want delay now. Did they know the X division was on their heels? Had they made a mistake? But not even the X could stop the twins. If Con came she’d make him see the foolishness of keeping up this game, make him give up the marble. It wasn’t right to keep it until everyone died. Not even to trap the twins.
She laughed, seeing the world ending, bit by bit, while the twins searched on and on for the very blue marble. She felt Danny’s head turn at the laugh and she was rigid again. She’d make Con see it; she’d make him, knowing how impossible it was to make Con do anything he didn’t believe. But if he didn’t see it, she’d give them the blue marble anyway, fling it in their faces, get rid of them, anything to make them go away. Until they were gone there could be no peace again, nothing usual.
Ann was foolish. She had to shatter the quiet which David had so kindly given. “When will we go back to the city?”
Danny yawned. “Aren’t you enjoying your visit?”
Griselda turned sharply. Ann’s back was harsh against their chair.
David said, “Don’t be disturbing, Ann. We can’t go yet. We’ve other guests coming, you know.”
“Others?” She shouldn’t have such pitying fear in each word, each look. Griselda walked to the fire against the chair.
“Yes. Con’s coming. Or so the twins say.”
“We hope so,” David admitted. “We might have food. Missy, ask that creature why it isn’t ready.”
Missy lay flat on the rug, her knees in the air. “Why don’t you?”
He told her, “I can’t bear to look at her ugly face.”
Missy said, “I always get the hard work.” She rolled over on her stomach, then jumped up.
Danny must have done it deliberately. He could have waited until she was in the kitchen. He knew she hadn’t even opened the door. He yawned and stretched again, stood and crossed to Ann. “You’re bored. So am I. We’ll take a walk this afternoon, shall we?”
Ann was foolishly grateful out of her exasperation. “Yes, let’s. Anything. I’ll go mad if I sit around much longer. I’m not very well tuned to the country.”
Missy closed herself out of the room too quietly. Griselda had been afraid to look at her eyes.
5
Danny and Ann were out of sight. Griselda pleated the window chintz between two fingers. When she turned into the room, David was gone. Missy was still plunged in the chair, her eyebrows pulled together. She began speaking tonelessly, obscenely, as if in a bad dream.
Griselda said, “I’m as bored as you are here. Why don’t you get the twins to go back to New York?”
Missy laughed viciously. “They’re yellow. All at once they’re yellow. As if they could not take care of Con. I alone could take care of him. They are fools.” She ground out the stub of one cigarette, lighted another immediately. David had warned Missy. She had promised but now she lighted another before the taste of the first was out of her mouth. They were not the depressive ones. Her eyes glistened; she could not sit quietly; her fingers moved, her throat. “Fools,” she said. “They listen to no one. Not even me.”
Griselda took a chair, not too near; a convenient chair, convenient for exit to the door if Missy should become-rabid. She suggested, “Maybe they’ve heard of Barjon Garth.”
Missy leaned to her. “No one can do anything to the twins unless they allow it.”
“That can’t be true.” She didn’t want to antagonize the little fiend, but if she could only make her understand that the two weren’t invincible, that even their evilness didn’t make them not human, not invulnerable, maybe even now she could help Missy out of this hallucination. She said, “How do you think that, Missy? If they are cut shaving, don’t they bleed? If they stumble, don’t their ankles turn?” She didn’t know what Missy’s eyes said but she went on, almost harsh in her insistence. “What you mean is that usually they aren’t hurt because they take the offensive. But if someone should strike first…”
Missy said rudely, “You talk too much. I’m going out.”
“Alone?” Griselda repeated, “I’m bored too. Isn’t there any way to get them started back to the city? They’re waiting for Con, but he isn’t coming. He’s gone back to the border.”
“How do you know? He was in Canaan this week.”
“He had to go back. He has a job there.” If she could but make Missy believe. “He can’t just sit around and do nothing. He isn’t wealthy like the twins.”
Missy laughed at her. “Maybe you think they’re doing nothing.” And then her eyes were narrow again. “I’m going out.”
“For what?” Griselda stretched in the chair as if lazy, comfortable. “You know you can’t endure walking and it’s too cold to swim in the afternoon. Where’s David?”
“He is probably asleep.”
Griselda doubted it. He was probably in his plane, somewhere near he doubtless had one, or in that long dark car, going back to the city again, trying to coax Con to come into this trap. She was so weary of it all. She didn’t care if Con did come. If he came, he’d know a way to get out of the nightmare. He was reckless and silly, but he was smart. She’d been wrong worrying about him. She’d forgotten how smart he was. She could weep for Con, to have Con holding her, protecting her from the horrors that were here.
Missy said cruelly, as if she could read her mind, “They’re fools staying bottled up here while Con’s probably taken the marble and beat it. They think Con will come here because you are here. He doesn’t care that much for you. I don’t think you’re the type men care for. You’re pretty enough but you’re cold.”
Griselda hated her. She wanted to say, “You think I’m cold because I can’t stand your precious twins.” But she didn’t say it. She said something else, looking at Missy, not believing it. “You’re my little sister.”
Missy for the instant seemed real again, as if she’d come out of the web of drug she was weaving about herself. “That’s right, I am.” She spoke as strangely as Griselda had.
“We had the same father, a good father. The same mother-doesn’t she care what happens to you, Missy?”
That bitter laugh came again. “She doesn’t care what happens to any of us as long as we don’t bother her in her toy palace.” Again the laugh, more feline now. “It’s a good thing she doesn’t. We’d have to get rid of her too. As we did Marie Montefierrow when she got nosey.”
Griselda exclaimed softly in horror, although she should have known before, “Oh, no!”
Missy’s smile was evil. “Why not? You didn’t believe that overdose of sleeping tablets, did you?”
And Griselda said again, sick, “Oh, no.”
Missy licked her chops. “There’s so many easy ways to get rid of people. After we get the marble…”
Griselda changed the subject wildly, foolishly, grasping for anything, “Why did they bring Ann here? Why drag her into this?” And knew her foolishness when Missy’s eyes were slitted like a snake’s.
“Because Danny wants beauty the way David wants power, the way you want clothes…”
The way Missy wants violence, hate, and the taste of blood. She couldn’t let the ugly child go now. She kept her there talking, smoking, until her own throat was parched, and her body aching from the cramped chair. Until it was almost dusk, and Ann and Danny came noisily up on the por
ch, through the door. Ann was flushed from wind, her eyes bright, her hair blown. She was gay again, normal. Griselda stood quickly in her path, shielding her from Missy.
Danny threw down his stick across the chair. “O glorious walk!”
“It was. Glorious. And the sunset on the lake! Did you see it?”
“No.” How to get Ann away quickly. There was a way. “You’d best go up and cream your face before it’s roughed. I’ll go with you.” She clutched her sister’s arm, almost ran her up to the bedroom. She heard Danny saying, “Get me a drink, Missy,” and Missy’s deliberately vicious, “Get your own god-damned drink, Pig!”
She opened the door of the upper room, closed it quickly, put her back tight against it, to shut away what was to occur below. She cried out, “Ann, Ann, why did you go alone with Danny?”
Ann’s fingertips were in the cream. “But it was perfectly all right, Griselda. He was charming, delightful. Really an interesting afternoon. He told me all about his set on the continent and it was amusing.”
Griselda was defeated. She sagged against the door. There were only faint sounds from below. She had to try again. “Ann, it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous to stay here any longer. We’ve got to get away.” She wouldn’t let Ann be slaughtered as Nesta had been.
Ann answered, “No wonder you’re morbid if you’ve been amusing Missy all afternoon. I do believe-” she wiped away the oiliness from her fingers-”I really do believe she’s the cause of all the evil that you’ve mentioned. I don’t believe the twins have one thing to do with it.” The cream was laid on thickly, a mask on her face. She looked at her reflection. “I’ll let it soak for ten minutes. I’ll have time for that long a rest before dinner, I’m sure. And my feet are tired. We must have walked four miles.”
Griselda touched the knob. “All right. Will you lock the door after me?”
Ann smiled. “Of course, dear, if you insist. But I do think you and I have been being geese.”
Griselda waited until she heard the key turn in the lock. It was quiet below; she had been wrong; there wasn’t a scene after all. She went down the stairs. Maybe there’d be a little peace; she could read something, get away momentarily from the horrible present. She turned into the living room, and then she shrank against the wall.
She had never seen hatred a living thing before, a twisted horrible living thing. But she saw Danny’s eyes looking at Missy, she saw the curve of Missy’s back, the projection of her head, one corner of her mouth. It was as if nothing could be more hideous, but it was, even as Griselda stood there, before she could leave as unnoticed as she came. Missy’s fingers were a snake striking, there was the glint of steel from the stick there, and Danny’s left cheek lay open, red, soft.
Griselda didn’t scream. Her breath caught, her throat was swollen, her heart wasn’t beating. The cane clanked as it fell. Missy’s laughter shrieked as a madwoman’s. “Danny…” She choked it in mirth, screaming it, “Oh, Danny!”
And then without warning she sprawled face down on the floor with yet another steel quivering in her back. David passed Griselda, standing there a part of the wall. She hadn’t heard him come in, yet she had heard and not heard the porch door open, the footsteps. He pulled the steel out of Missy, walked to Danny, presented it to him. And then she did not scream, but groaned, sick to her marrow of death and violence and the slimy horror of these three. For Danny took the sword and without word or motion laid open David’s cheek in a like thrust. They heard the groan. They turned their blank eyes and saw her there for the first time.
David said simply, “She tried to kill my brother.”
6
She was rooted, she couldn’t move even if she were the next to smear blood over the room. Nor did they move. And she wasn’t frightened now for herself or for anyone. She was as dead as those they had killed.
She would be the next to lie motionless; she knew that now. Once they had the marble, they would do to her as they had to others, how many others no one would ever know. She could not be allowed to live; she knew them too well, had been with them too often when she should not have been. But it didn’t matter. Not now. Nothing mattered except that they should have the marble and go away, go before they hurt others. Although it meant her death, although it meant that she could never again belong to Con, at least he should be safe, his gay recklessness preserved for someone else to love as she had loved him, and as he would never know.
She didn’t want to look again but her eyes were there. Missy was so tiny, so young, flung down there on the floor. If you didn’t see that soft crimson spreading, it was as if it were a child at rest. Missy needed to rest, she who had been restless all this day, so many days. Even as a child, she had never possessed peace. She had never belonged to a home and love and security as once had Griselda and Ann. She had been too young to know their father, his gentle pride of his daughters, his two, then three little daughters. It was Missy that their mother had taken away with her, not that she wanted her, not from her heart, but because she was too little to be left behind. No one had ever had time for Missy; no one had ever wanted her, no one until the twins came along.
It was better this way, better that she should be lying there, motionless forever. She couldn’t have been taken away from them; she couldn’t ever have understood. She wasn’t a pathetic little figure sprawled down there; it was ridiculous to think of her that way. She was cruel and vicious; she’d been an unleashed evil, a dangerous animal, all the more dangerous because she was too young to want to understand. Yet somehow there was something about death that seemed to change all that, that made you fight tears stinging your nostrils, seeing her there, remembering incongruously a sleeping baby in a crib canopied in pale blue. Missy was alone again, lying there, lonely and unwanted as she’d been for those too many, too short, years. But now it needn’t hurt; Missy didn’t know; she would never know. She was gone. Griselda turned her eyes away, back to the still motionless twins. She was glad Missy was dead, glad!
She said dully, “I’ll give yon the marble. Take me back and I’ll give it to you.” She didn’t care what Con said, what Con thought. She didn’t care if she was letting down all the X departments of the world. She couldn’t let any more of this hideousness be unleashed.
She felt her way to the doorway, trying to choke back the nausea that pressed into her throat. She said, “Don’t tell Ann what’s happened.” And, “I wish I’d given it to you a long time ago.” Then she went blindly up to wake her sister.
PART XIV
1
The car was at the door when they came down. Griselda had made delay in the packing, but she was still afraid for Ann to pass the living room. She had to see before Ann did. It was clean. David and Danny were on the porch in the early dusk, their coats turned up about their cheeks, their hats pulled low over their eyes. The sticks were under their arms. Ann didn’t notice. She didn’t ask where the car had come from; she didn’t care.
Danny climbed into the front. David helped Ann first, then Griselda, himself last, his left cheek by the window.
When the car started, Ann asked, “Isn’t Missy coming?”
David’s voice was without feeling. “No. She’s staying here.”
The drive in was silent. Everything was over, fatigued. Ann didn’t understand, but the others knew it was the end. The twins weren’t elated with their victory; they were gray as dream figures. Only when the glow of Riverside was against the sky did Griselda speak, in undertone to David.
“I’m going to take Ann up, get her settled. You can wait for me. You needn’t be afraid I’ll run away.”
“I’m not.”
Ann said, “I do wonder if Arthur’s returned. I hope so. I feel like dancing tonight.” So easily had she returned to East Seventy-ninth Street. She added, “Would you join us?”
David said, “No. We have business tonight”
Griselda said, “No.” All she wanted was to get into a bed and sleep for a hundred years. To sleep, to wake and fin
d this but a dream after all.
The car stopped at reality. Ann’s apartment, tall and dark and strong. Ann said, “You needn’t go up, Griselda.”
“I want to.” On the walk she spoke again to David. “I shan’t be long.” The clock in the lobby said that it wasn’t yet ten o’clock.
It wasn’t more than ten when she returned to the car.
David asked, “The apartment?”
She nodded. Might as well end it where it began. Might as well give Con one last chance to win. She could pretend once there that she must have at least until morning, make up some tale that it was impossible to get it for them before then. They didn’t know but that it was in some vault somewhere. They didn’t know the little blue stone was in her wadded handkerchief now, in her purse. She could hand it to them, never see them again-never see Con again! She knew they wouldn’t let her live. But Con might be at the apartment, and faint chance that even now he might work it out. If she could speak to him, tell him of Missy, he would have the evidence that he and the X men wanted. This time she had been there, eyewitness. Nor could the twins have had time to do away with all trace of the body. She knew that Perhaps Con could win yet. He wasn’t in danger, not now. She alone was. She held the marble and she would give it up. But not yet. Not until she took this final chance.
The car drew to the curb. David helped her out Danny stood on the other side. It was like the first night but they weren’t gay, laughing now. There were pain lines at their lips.
The elevator groaned to the first floor, clanked. They rode in that whimpering silence to the floor, and out.
Danny said, “There’s someone inside-a light.” Con was there. Impossible, yet he must be. She pushed the button keeping her finger tight on it. That would give Con a chance to prepare. She hid disappointment when Jasper Coldwater opened the door, abused, cross Jasper.
The So Blue Marble Page 17
