Night-World

by Robert Bloch

  NIGHT-WORLD

  Robert Bloch, the creator of Psycho, takes you into the inner recesses of the mind of a madman.

  A man bent on revenge that comes out of the night, grabbing its victims by the throat and giving no quarter.

  From the moment Karen Raymond entered the sanitarium, she knew something was terribly wrong. The doctors had been brutally murdered, the patients had escaped.

  Was she to be the killer’s next victim?

  The phone rang.

  “Miss Anderson? This is Lieutenant Barringer, Los Angeles Police Department.”

  It was hard to hear him over the T.V. The Lieutenant was saying something about bodies. “How many other patients were staying at the sanatorium?”

  “Five.” There was no draft, but Dorothy was shivering.

  “Can you give me their names, please?”

  “Yes.” Now she could feel a hint of an air current. Dorothy started to scream . . .

  In a moment there were four things open in the apartment. The bathroom window. The door of the closet. The kitchen drawer where the butcher knife was kept. And the jugular vein in Dorothy’s throat.

  The T.V. in the living room promised that tomorrow would be fair and warmer.

  Look for these Tor books

  by Robert Bloch

  THE NIGHT OF THE RIPPER

  NIGHT-WORLD

  NIGHT-WORLD

  Copyright © 1972 by Robert Bloch

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  First Tor printing: December 1986

  A TOR Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  49 West 24 Street

  New York, N.Y. 10010

  Cover art by Joe DeVito

  ISBN: 0-812-51570-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book is for

  Zander

  who will probably

  never read it.

  CHAPTER 1

  The sun was dying in the west and its blood stained the sky.

  I could have been a poet, he thought. A writer. But that would have been a waste, a great waste of his talent. A writer’s life is short—limited to the life of the paper on which his words are inscribed, and the memory-span of his readers. Paper is brittle and soon crumbles to dust, and the worms eat memories.

  Who eats the worms?

  Time. Time is the enemy. Time eats the worms, time eats the paper, time eats the sun. Time was eating him, bit by bit, piece by piece, day by day.

  Time gnawed at him by night, here in this miserable little room. They called it a room, but of course it was really a cell. A cell with wire-mesh windows through which a dying man could watch the dying sun.

  They told him he was here for his own good, and the locked door was a protection against the other patients. But it couldn’t protect him against time. Gnawing away, night after night, so that he couldn’t sleep. And it couldn’t protect him against his protectors. They had a key.

  Any hour of the day or night they could come and get him—take what remained after time finished feasting. Draining his blood. For tests, they told him. Did they really expect him to believe that? He recognized them for what they were, these creatures seeking his life’s blood for their own existence. They had cast aside their cloaks for robes of white, and they drew their nourishment with needles rather than with pointed teeth, but they were vampires.

  Worse than vampires. For they were feeding on his brain too. ECT. Electroconvulsive therapy. The scientific term for shock treatment which is the polite euphemism for strapping you down and shooting electricity into your brain to eat away your mind. They took his body and put it in a cell, they took his blood and put it in a test tube—now they wanted to take his brain and put it in a machine.

  But they failed. He could still remember the past. And he could still plan for the future. Night after sleepless night here in his room, he planned.

  It was perfection, his plan, it was sheer poetry, yet he wouldn’t write it down. Instructions for the Blind—Please Read Carefully. They must not see his plan, must not suspect. He had it all hidden away in a secret place. The darkest place in the world is the inside of a human skull.

  Everything is safe inside your skull. Because it’s protected by a mask called a face, and the face responds the way they want it to respond. It smiles at jokes, sobers at the sight of unpleasantness, assumes a properly respectful look in the presence of authority. And the face has a mouth, and the mouth says what the doctor wants it to say. It doesn’t even whisper about the plan. Yes, Doctor, I think I’m much better. I’m beginning to feel like my old self again.

  Nobody wants you to really tell it like it is. They want you to tell it like they think it should be. A model patient: quiet, cooperative, showing distinct signs of improvement. The mouth knows how to make it sound that way.

  And by so doing, it helps with the plan. Doctor doesn’t know. Nurse doesn’t suspect. Orderly hasn’t a clue. As long as the face is calm and the mouth says the right words, nobody realizes the truth. That the mouth is just part of a mask, and behind the mask there is a skull and inside the skull is . . .

  Inside the skull is everything. Turn it upside down—dump out the contents the way you empty a barracks bag, a woman’s purse. What do you find? Something for everyone.

  Mysticism. My horoscope tells me not to believe in astrology.

  Science. Ornithology is for the birds.

  Literature. Pornography makes strange bedfellows.

  Philosophy. Actions speak louder than four-letter words.

  He knew what the doctor would say. He’d said it so often during their sessions. “You’re using words as a shield. Obfuscation is a defense mechanism. You talk to avoid saying anything.”

  What did he expect?

  Suppose he told the doctor he’d been thinking about Jimmy Savo. Doctor probably wouldn’t even remember the name.

  Jimmy Savo. A stage comic of the past. Little man, did pantomimes which reminded critics of Chaplin. Like the one he did in a picture that turned up on the late TV. Jimmy Savo, doing his famous routine to the old song, “River, Stay ’Way From My Door.”

  You’d have to explain that to the doctor. And then you’d have to explain why Jimmy Savo reminds you of the famous mass murderers of history.

  They are famous, of course. People who couldn’t possibly tell you who was President of France fifty years ago can still recognize the name of Landru. Who remembers that Gilles de Retz rode with Joan of Arc—but who forgets that he was Bluebeard? People are still guessing at the identity of the Cleveland Torso Slayer. And it wasn’t too long ago that the papers made a big thing over the theory that Jack the Ripper was really a member of the British nobility.

  He was, of course. In a world of victims, the killers are the true aristocracy. That’s the one lesson of history: the real hero deals in death. The lion is King of Beasts, not the lamb. And to you, Jimmy Savo sang a different song. “Ripper, Stay ’Way From My Whore.”

  You can’t tell this to the doctor. Not to him, that dedicated healer, that self-professed lover of humanity! We’re all lovers of humanity, of course, each and every one of us. But what most of us forget is that each man kills the thing he loves. The coward does it by dropping a bomb from a plane five miles in the air—the brave man uses a knife, five inches from his prey.

  Now hear this, Doctor. And hear this, all you kings, emperors, presidents, admirals, generals, commanders-in-chief. Listen to the words unspoken:

  “I shall not kill because you order me to kill; because you issue me a uniform, a weapon and a command. That is fraud.

  “I shall not kill because of something that happened between me and my mother, father, sister, brother
, wife. That is Freud, and he is a fraud, too.

  “I shall kill because I am a brave man. And a brave man is true to his nature.

  “It is the nature of man to be free, to resent confinement. It is the nature of man to oppose hypocrisy and injustice. I shall kill in the name of all mankind—all mankind confined hypocritically and unjustly in asylums, prisons, hospitals, rest homes. I shall kill in the name of those who have been punished for their courage in openly defying society. In the name of those who are labeled misfit and unfit. In the name of the bastard buried away in an orphanage and the millions dying neglected and forgotten, institutionalized merely because they have committed the crime of growing old.

  “I believe in the principles of democracy. One man, one vote. And mine is a vote of protest—a vote that will register and be remembered. Mass murderers are famous.

  “Big talk? But I haven’t said a word, not to anyone. Even those who will aid me in my plan do not remotely realize my purpose or the full meaning of the part they will play in executing it.”

  Executing. That’s the word . . .

  That was the word.

  And now, with the night falling, it would become a deed.

  He stared at the dying sun and thought of what else would be dying soon.

  Very soon.

  CHAPTER 2

  After lunch Karen went back to the office.

  She blinked her way through the smog-shrouded streets without conscious protest; it was always smoggy in downtown Los Angeles, or almost always. On a clear day you can see your eye doctor.

  Karen’s office was in a high-rise owned by a savings and loan firm. There seemed to be thousands of such new buildings springing up all over the city in the past few years, and if they were laid end to end it would merely be the expected consequence of another earthquake.

  Karen accepted the possibility as she accepted the smog; it really wasn’t her worry. And it really wasn’t Karen’s office she was going to. The name on the door of the tenth-floor suite was Sutherland Advertising Agency, Inc.

  She opened the door and moved through the reception room, nodding at Peggy behind the glass partition. Like all such receptionists, Peggy had been chosen for her display value as a beautiful birdbrain. Peasant under glass.

  Peggy offered her an official smile of welcome, second class, and pressed the buzzer releasing the lock on the unmarked door at the far right side of the room. Karen turned the knob and entered the corridor beyond.

  Now she was in another world. Suther Land, she called it, in the private geography of her mind. The long corridor down which she passed was like a highway in a strange and secret kingdom.

  Behind the big oak-paneled double door was the throne room of the ruler, Carter Sutherland III. One of the strange things was that the room didn’t contain a desk: in the realms of business, the mark of supremacy is an office without such a demeaning device of drudgery. All a modern ruler needs is a gracious and ostentatious setting for his bar, his intercom and his dictating machine. A dictator—that was Sutherland’s true function. Of course rulers seldom spend much time in throne rooms, and one of the secrets was that the biggest office in the Sutherland Advertising Agency, Inc., was usually unoccupied. Karen had seen the man only twice during the four years she’d worked here, and not at all since he’d suffered a stroke on his yacht six months ago. Since then, the agency business had increased almost twenty percent, but that could have been mere coincidence.

  Karen moved down the hall past the oak-paneled single doors of the next-largest offices. There were five of these, for the five account executives. Account executives had desks, but in deference to their rank, the desk tops were bare of everything except a telephone. The clutter of paperwork accumulated on the smaller desks of their personal secretaries. And like their superior, the account executives were seldom to be found in the office, although their secretaries could always reach them and intercept calls from their wives.

  Farther along the corridor were the domains of the Art Director, the Media Director, the Copy Chief. Linked by a commonly shared meeting room, their quarters were smaller, but very definitely occupied. The individual doors were constantly opening and closing with the comings and goings of printers, engravers, sales reps, messengers and lesser staff personnel carrying memos in and out. Sometimes the meetings—and the profanity—spilled over into the hall, but Karen was used to sidestepping the huddles that threatened to block her progress.

  Now she turned the corner into the angled corridor beyond and walked along a row of doorless cubicles lining either side—a series of one-windowed cells barely large enough to contain a filing cabinet, two chairs, and a small desk or drawing board for the individual occupants. Hardly impressive, but then artists and copywriters weren’t expected to impress anyone; they merely did the creative work which kept the agency in business.

  At the far end of the second corridor, Karen stepped into her own niche, put her purse in the desk drawer, pushed the telephone to one side, and sat down to study the approved and initialed rough layout for a full-page black-and-white scheduled to run in the fashion magazines listed in the accompanying memo and work-data sheet. She glanced at the notes and suggestions, then studied the rough, trying to visualize the finished artwork.

  In the foreground, arms folded defiantly across his bare chest, a scowling young man with shaggy hair tumbling across his forehead, the slitted stare of his heavy-lidded eyes suggesting the acid-head. Striped trousers, very tight in the crotch, just suggesting.

  Behind him, the girl—all angularity and elbows, hands on hips and legs outthrust. Long straight hair strand-strung on either side of exaggeratedly high cheekbones and sullen slash of mouth. The young witch, suffering from malnutrition or stardom in an Andy Warhol film.

  Midway between the two, a chopper or bike. Not a motorcycle—only the pigs ride motorcycles; we ride hogs.

  Karen made a mental note of the distinction: pigs are bad, hogs are good. If she referred to the machine at all in the copy block, she must remember that. On the other hand, the ad was for the striped pants, and she’d better concentrate on the merchandise. She began to run through phrases, discarding as she went. Dig, bag, with it, doing your thing—last year’s vocabulary, but a dead language today. And the Now Generation was presently known as the Beautiful People. Their clothes would be heavy, or funky. Gear. Karen reached for pad and pencil and jotted down a tentative headline—Geared for Action.

  No sense bothering with an actual description of the trousers; no one buys striped pants, they buy a look. And the look was—what? In deep. Thrust. Put it all together—and today’s lexicon of popular phrases sounded like a description of the activities in a whorehouse.

  On the other hand, who was she to pass judgment? This was a whorehouse, Karen reminded herself, a whorehouse pandering to the appetites of youth. And what she was doing was whoring. Next year the phrases would change—but she would still be a whore. Unless she got out of here and took up an honest profession, like prostitution. Meanwhile she needed the money, Bruce needed the money, and she’d better write the copy.

  The phone rang. Karen uncradled it.

  “Sweetheart?”

  She recognized the voice, and the approach, of the Copy Chief.

  “Yes, Mr. Haskane.”

  “Girnbach just called. They want to see copy when they look at the rough this afternoon.”

  “I’m working on it now. Give me another twenty minutes.”

  “Beautiful! My place or yours?”

  “I’ll bring it over as soon as I’m finished.”

  “Don’t bother to knock. There’ll be cold champagne and a warm mattress waiting.”

  Karen let the Copy Chief hang up without giving him an answer. Poor Haskane—she understood his hang-up only too well. A pudgy, balding little man, caught in the middle of the generation gap. A potbelly with no stomach for pot.

  And it must be doubly hard for Haskane to be working with constant reminders of what he was missing, surroun
ded by ads for hot pants and never glimpsing or grasping the reality. He’d be jealous of the agency’s account execs with their location trips for magazine ad spreads, their expense accounts for a week in Cannes to photograph a nude model holding a light bulb which, like the girl, was AC-DC. Haskane supplied the word, they enjoyed the deed. No wonder he was aggressive on the phone.

  Karen wondered what would happen if she ever took him up on one of those verbal passes. The poor bastard would probably drop dead on the way to a motel. Then again, he might surprise her.

  Worse still, she might surprise herself. After all, it had been a long time since she’d gone the cold champagne and warm mattress route, and how could she be so sure of her own response? Wasn’t she subject to the same pressures as the man she presumed to pity? Selling sex and never buying; always a bridesmaid and never a bride. She’d been a bride once—Mrs. Karen Raymond. Now she was a wife. A wife in name only, isn’t that how they say it?

  To hell with them. And to hell with Ed Haskane and his roll in the hay. She was as square as he, probably; not old, not ugly, but just as hung-up in the outmoded mores of her own background.

  Karen shook her head and dismissed the subject. Turning to the desk, she fed paper and carbon into the machine. For the next twenty minutes she concentrated on the picture of the scowling, half-naked young man and his unkempt companion, dutifully ignoring the impulse to caption the ad Me Tarzan—You Ape.

  The electric portable hummed and she murmured, and at last the page was covered with breathless prose celebrating the ineffable glories of a pair of striped pants, complete with crotch-phrases, very tightly written.

  Karen ripped the copy out, deposited one carbon in her desk drawer, then clipped the other carbon and the original to the top of the rough layout. She rose and started for the door, and it was then that the phone rang again.

  She moved back to her desk, picked up the receiver, listened.

  “Mrs. Karen Raymond?”