“Here I am on Station Four, folks, having a wonderful time and wish you were here instead of me. Oh, it’s not that bad, don’t get me wrong. But I guess I know what knocked out Corrigan and the poor bastards before him. It was Lover and her cannibal mind eating them up. But I’ll tell you this; it’s not going to eat me up. That much you can put bets on. Lover isn’t going to …
“No, I didn’t call you! Come on, get out of my life, will ya? Go to a movie or something. Yeah, yeah, I know. Well, go to bed then. Just leave me alone.” Alone.
“There. That’s for her. She’ll have to go some to get me clawing at the walls.”
But he carefully locked the door to his room when he went to bed. And he groaned in his sleep because of the same nightmare and his limbs thrashed and all peace and rest were crowded out.
He twisted into wakefulness in mid-morning and stumbled up to check the door. He fumbled at the lock with heavy fingers. Finally his thickened brain divined the fact that the door was still locked and he went back to bed in a weaving line and fell on it into a stupored sleep.
When he woke up in the morning there were flowers at the foot of his bed, luxuriantly purple and foul-smelling and the door was locked.
He couldn’t ask her about it because he left the kitchen in revulsion when she called him dear.
No more flowers! I’ll promise! cried her pursuing thoughts. He locked himself in the living room and sat at the desk, feeling sick. Get hold of yourself!—he ordered his system, clasping his hands tightly and holding his teeth firmly clenched.
Eat?
She was outside the door; he knew it. He closed his eyes. Go away, leave me alone, he told her.
I’m sorry, dear, she said.
“Stop calling me ‘dear’!” he shouted, slamming his fist on the desk surface. As he twisted in the chair, his belt buckle caught on the drawer handle and it jerked out. He found himself staring down at the shiny gas pistol. Almost unconsciously he reached down and touched its slick barrel.
He shoved in the drawer with a convulsive movement. None of that! he swore.
He looked around suddenly, feeling alone and free. He got up and hurried to the window. Down below, he saw her hurrying across the grounds with a basket on her arm. She’s going for vegetables, he thought. But what made her leave so suddenly?
Of course. The pistol. She must have gotten his thoughts of violent intent.
He sighed and calmed down a little, feeling as if his brain had been drained of thick, noxious fluids.
I’ve still got cards in my hand, he soothed himself.
While she was out he decided to look in her room and see if he could find the shifting panel that enabled her to enter his room with the flowers. He hurried down the hall and pushed open the door to her barely furnished little chamber.
His brain was immediately attacked by the odor of a reeking pile of the purple flowers in one corner. He held a hand over his mouth and nose as he looked down in distaste at the living and dead blossoms.
What did they represent?—he wondered. An offering of thoughtfulness? His throat contracted. Or was it more than thoughtfulness? He grimaced at the thought and remembered that first evening when he’d dubbed her Lover. What had possessed him to choose that name from the infinity of possible names? He hoped he didn’t know.
On the couch he found a small pile of odds and ends. There was a button, a pair of broken shoe laces, the piece of crumpled paper he had told her to throw away. And a belt buckle with the initials W. C. stamped on it.
There were no secret panels.
He sat in the kitchen staring into an untouched cup of coffee. No way she could get in his room. W. C.—William Corrigan. He had to fight it, keep fighting it.
Time passed. And suddenly, he realized that she was back in the house again. There was no sound; it was like the return of a ghost. But he knew it. A cloud of feeling preceded her, came plunging through the rooms like an excited puppy, searching. Thoughts swirled. You are well? You are not angry? Lover is back—all hastily and eagerly clutching at him.
She swept into the room so quickly that his hands twitched and he upset the cup. The hot liquid splashed over his shirt and trousers as he jumped back, knocking over the chair.
She put down the basket and got a towel as she patted the stains dry. She’d never been so close to him. She’d never actually touched him before except for that first handshake.
There was an aroma about her. It made his chest heave painfully. And all the time, her thoughts caressed his mind as her hands seemed to be caressing his body.
There. There … I am here with you.
David dear.
Almost in horror, he stared at her spongy pink skin, her huge eyes, her tiny wound of a mouth.
And, in the office that morning, he made three straight mistakes in the log book and tore out a whole page and hurled it across the room with a choking cry of rage.
Avoid her. No point in remonstration. He tried to raze his mental ground so that her thoughts could not find domicile there. If he relaxed his mind enough, her thoughts flowed through and out. Perhaps taking part of his will as they left but he’d have to risk that.
And if he worked hard and crowded his head with stodgy banks of figures, it kept her at a distance and his hands did not tremble so badly.
Maybe I should sleep in the office, he thought. Then he found Corrigan’s note.
It was on a white slip of paper stuck away in the log book, hidden white on white. He only found it because he was going through the pages one at a time, reciting the dates in a loud voice to keep his mind filled.
God help me, read the note, black and jagged-lettered, Lover comes through the walls!
Lindell stared. I saw it myself, attested the words, I’m going out of my mind. Always that damn animal mind tugging and tearing at me. And now I can’t even shut away her body. I slept out here but she came anyway. And I. . .
Lindell read it again and it was a wind fanning the fires of terror. Through the walls. The words agonized him. Was it possible?
And it was Corrigan then who had named her Lover. From the very start, the relationship had been on her terms. Lindell had had nothing to say about it.
“Lover,” he muttered and her thoughts enveloped him suddenly like a carrion’s wings swooping down from the sky. He flung up his arms and cried out—“Leave me alone!”
And, as her phantom mind slipped off, he had the sense that it was with less timidity, with the patience such as a man knowing his own great strength can afford to display.
He sank back on the chair, exhausted, suddenly, depleted with fighting it. He crumpled the note in his right hand, thinking of the scratches on the wall behind him.
And he saw in his mind: Corrigan tossing on the cot, burning with fever, rearing up with a shriek of horror to see her standing before him. But then. Then? The scene was dark.
He rubbed a shaking hand over his face. Don’t crack, he said to himself. But it was more a frightened entreaty than a command. Wasting fogs of premonition flooded over him in chilling waves. She comes through the walls.
That night again, he poured the potion she made down his bathroom sink. He locked the door and, in the lightless room, he squatted in one corner, peering and waiting, lungs bellowing in spasmodic bursts.
The thermostat lowered the heat. The floorboards got icy and his teeth started chattering. I’m not going to bed, he vowed angrily. He didn’t know why it was that suddenly the bed frightened him. I don’t know, he forced the words through his brain because he felt vaguely that he did know and he didn’t want to admit it, even for a second.
But after hours of futile waiting, he had to straighten up with a snapping of joints and stumble back to bed. There, he crawled under the blankets and lay trembling, trying to stay awake. She’ll come while I’m asleep, he thought, I mustn’t sleep.
When he woke up in the morning there were the flowers on the floor for him. And that was another day before a mass of days that sank crushe
d into the lump of months.
You can get used to horror, he thought. When it has lost immediacy and is no longer pungent and has become a steady diet. When it has degraded to a chain of mind-numbing events. When shocks are like scalpels picking and jabbing at delicate ganglia until they have lost all feeling.
Yet, though it was no longer terror, it was worse. For his nerves were raw and bleeding a hemophilia of rage. He fought his battles to the dregs of seconds, gaunt willed, shouting her off, firing lances of hate from his jaded mind; tortured by her surrenders that were her victories. She always came back. Like an enraging cat, rubbing endless sycophantic sides against him, filling him with thoughts of—yes, admit it!—he screamed to himself through midnight struggles …
Thoughts of love.
And there was the undercurrent, the promise of new shock that would topple his already shaking edifice. It needed only that—an added push, another stab of the blade, one more drop of the shattering hammer.
The shapeless threat hung over him. He waited for it, poised for it a hundred times an hour, especially at night. Wait. Waiting. And, sometimes, when he thought he knew what he was waiting for, the shock of admission made him shudder and made him want to claw at walls and break things and run until the blackness swallowed him.
If he could only forget her, he thought. Yes, if you could forget her for a while, just a little while, it would be all right.
He mumbled that to himself as he set up the movie projector in the living room.
She begged from the kitchen—Can I see?
“No!”
Now all his replies, worded or thought, were like the snapping retorts of a jangled old man. If only the six months would end. That was the problem. The months weren’t moving fast enough. And time was like her—not to be reasoned with or intimidated.
There were many reels on the wall shelf. But his hand reached out without hesitation and picked out one. He didn’t notice it; his mind was calloused to suggestion.
He adjusted the reel on the spindle and turned out the lights. He sat down with a tired groan as the flickering milky cone of light shot out from the lens, throwing pictures on the screen.
A lean, dark-bearded man was posing, arms crossed, white teeth showing in an artificial smile. He came closer to the camera. The sun flashed, blurring the film a second. Black screen. Title: Picture of me.
The man, high cheek-boned, bright-eyed, stood laughing soundlessly out from the screen. He pointed to the side and the camera swung around. Lindell sat up sharply.
It was the station.
Apparently it was autumn. For, as the camera swung past the house, the village, jerking a moment as though changing hands, he saw the trees surrounded by heaps of dead leaves. He sat there shivering, waiting for something, he didn’t know what.
The screen blacked. Another title roughly etched in white. Jeff In the Office.
The man peered at the camera, an idiotic smile on his face, white skin accentuated by the immaculate black outline of his beard.
Fadeout—in. The man doing a jig around the empty warehouse floor, hands poised delicately in the air, his dark hair bouncing wildly on his skull.
Another title flashing on the screen. Lindell stiffened in his seat, his breath cut off abruptly.
Title: Lover.
There was her face horribly repellent in black and white. She was standing by his bedroom window, her face a mask of delight. He could tell now it was delight. Once he would have said she looked like a maniac, her mouth twisted like a living scar, her grotesque eyes staring.
She spun and her robe swirled out. He saw her puffy ankles and his stomach grew rock taut.
She approached the camera; he saw filmy eyelids slide down over her eyes. His hands began to tremble violently. It was his dream. It made him sick. It was his dream to the detail. Then it had never been a dream—not from his own mind.
A sob tore at his throat. She was undoing the robe. Here it is! he screamed in his panic-stricken mind. He whimpered and reached out shakily to turn off the projector.
No.
It was a cold command in the darkness. Watch me, she ordered. He sat bound in a vise of terror, staring in sick fascination as the robe slid from her neck, pulled down over her round shoulders. She twisted sensuously. The robe sank into a heavy, swirling heap on the floor.
He screamed.
He flung out an arm and it swept into the burning projector. It crashed down on the floor. The room was night. He struggled up and lurched across the room. Nice? Nice? The word dug at him mercilessly as he fumbled for the door. He found it, rushed into the hall. Her door opened and she stood in the half light, the robe hanging from one smooth shoulder.
He jolted to a halt. “Get out of here!” he yelled.
No.
He made a convulsive move for her, hands out like rigid claws. The sight of her pink, dewy flesh spun him away. Yes? her mind suggested. It seemed as if he heard it spoken in a slyly rising voice …
“Listen!” he cried, reaching out for the door to his room. “Listen, you have to go, do you understand? Go to your mate!”
He twisted back in utter horror.
I am with him now—her message had said.
The thought paralyzed him. He stared, open-mouthed, heart pounding in slow, gigantic beats as the robe slipped over her shoulders and started down her arms.
He whirled with a cry and slammed the door behind him. His fingers shook on the lock. Her thoughts were a wailing in his mind. He whimpered in fright and sickness and knew it was no good because he couldn’t lock her out.
There were monkeys chattering in his brain. They lay on their backs in a circle and kicked at the inside of his skull. They grabbed juicy blobs of grey in their dirty paws and they squeezed.
He rolled on his side with a groan. I’ll go crazy, he thought. Like Corrigan, like all of them but the first one; that slimy one who started it all; who added a new and hideous warp to the corrugation of her dominating Gnee mind; who had named her Lover because he meant it.
Suddenly he sat up with a gasp of terror, staring at the foot of the bed. She comes through the walls!—howled his brain. Nothing there, his eyes saw. His fingers clutched at the sheets. He felt sweat dripping off his brow and rolling down the embankment of his nose.
He lay down. Up again! He whimpered like a frightened child. A cloud of blackness was falling over him. Her. Her. He groaned. “No.” In the blackness. No use.
He whined. Sleep. Sleep. The word throbbed, swelled and depressed in his brain. This is the time. He knew it, knew it, knew … .
The blade falling, sanity decapitated and twitching bloody in the basket.
No! He tried to push himself up but he couldn’t. Sleep. A black tide of night hovering, tracking.
Sleep.
He fell back on the pillow, pushed up weakly on one elbow.
“No.” His lungs were crusted. “No.”
He struggled. It was too much. He screamed a thick, bubbling scream. She threw his will aside, snapped and futile. She was using all her strength now and he was enervated, beaten. He thudded back on the pillow, glassy-eyed and limp. He moaned weakly and his eyes shut—opened—shut—opened—shut … .
The dream again. Insane. Not a dream.
When he woke up there were no flowers. The courtship was ended. He gaped blankly and unbelievingly at the imprint of a body beside him on the bed.
It was still warm and moist.
He laughed out loud. He wrote curse words in his diary. He wrote them in tall black letters, holding the pencil like a knife. He wrote them in the log book too. He tore up vouchers if they weren’t the right color. His entries were crooked lines of figures like wavynumbered tendrils. Sometimes he didn’t care about that. Mostly he didn’t notice.
He prowled the filled warehouse behind locked doors, red-eyed and muttering. He clambered up on the bundles and stared out through the skylight at the empty sky. He was lighter by fifteen pounds, unwashed. His face was black with wiry g
rowth. He was going to have an immaculate beard. She wanted it. She didn’t want him to wash or shave or be healthy. She called him Jeff.
You can’t fight that, he told himself. You can’t win because you lose. If you advance you are retreating because, when you are too tired to fight, she comes back and takes your city and your soul.
That’s why he whispered to the warehouse so no one would hear, “There is a thing to do.”
That’s why, late at night, he sneaked to the living room and put the gas pistol in his pocket. Never harm the Gnees. Well, that was wrong. It was kill or be killed. That’s why I’m taking the pistol to bed with me. That’s why I’m stroking it as I stare up at the ceiling. Yes, this is it. This is my rock to rest on through the daynights.
And he turned over plans as an animal snuffles over flat stones to find bugs for supper.
Days. Days. Days. He whispered, “Kill her.”
He nodded and smiled to himself and patted the cool metal. You’re my friend, he said, you’re my only friend. She has to die, we all know that.
He made lots of plans and they were all the same one. He killed her a million times in his mind—in secret chambers of his mind that he had discovered and opened; where he could crouch clever and undisturbed while he made his plans.
Animals. He walked and looked at the workers’ village. Animals. I’m not going to end up like you. I’m not going to I’m not going to I’m not going to I’m … .
He lurched up from his office desk, eyes wide, slaver running over his lips. He held the pistol tight in his palsied hand.
He flung open the office door and staggered over the concrete, through the lanes between roof-high stacks. His mouth was a line. He held the pistol pointing.
He flung up the catch and dragged back one heavy door. He plunged into the pouring sunlight and broke into a run. Wisps of terror licked out from the house. He reveled in them. He ran faster. He fell down because his legs were weak. The pistol went flying. He crawled to it and brushed off the dust. Now we’ll see, he promised the monkeys in his head, now.
Duel Page 13
