Listen for the Whisperer
Page 27
She was looking at me strangely, questioningly, and I turned away, not wanting her to see too much.
“Are you ready to go?” I said.
The cape she flung about her shoulders was a dramatic scarlet gabardine, with a black velvet hood to protect her hair. She pulled no covering over her fragile slippers and I wondered if they would be ruined on the way to the car.
In the hall she went directly to Irene’s room, with a tossed request to me to summon Miles and Donia. I stopped at Miles’s door, but before I could rap, I heard voices. I knew he was talking to his sister, and I listened intently, hoping for some betrayal.
“I’ll get your plane reservation for home as soon as I can,” he was telling her angrily. “I’ve stood as much as I mean to—we’ll have no more of this.”
Donia’s reply came in a voice so choked that I couldn’t make out the words.
“Come along,” Miles said curtly, “get your things on—we’ll be leaving for the theater soon.”
This time I could hear her shrill answer. “I won’t go! I’d rather stay home than—”
“You’ll come,” Miles said and I heard her gasp, as though he might have touched her roughly.
I backed away from the door and as Laura left Irene’s room, Miles and Donia came out of his. Donia’s head was lowered as she busied herself with pulling on a plastic rain hood. Laura gave her a quick glance and then looked away as we all went downstairs.
We drove through the rain into town and only Laura seemed determinedly gay and lighthearted. This was her defense, I knew—her gallant defiance of whatever threatened her. When Gunnar joined us in the attractive dining room of the Hotel Orion, her insistence upon a festive mood had its effect upon the rest of us. When I started to tell Gunnar what had happened back at the house, Laura stopped me at once, her look a little too bright, her manner imperious.
“We’ll talk about nothing unpleasant tonight,” she insisted. “This is to be a lovely evening. An evening to remember.” And she gave herself to making it so, in spite of any strains that might lie beneath the surface in all of us.
Only when it came to Miles did she sometimes falter into uncertainty, as though she were torn between cajoling and flouting. His response was carefully courteous, but I know that he watched her as though he waited for something he knew might be eventually forthcoming. Some cracking of her guard? I wondered.
I sat next to Gunnar, and he talked to me pleasantly, though he watched Laura’s electric manner in dismay. It was as if he too waited for some breaking point.
I have no remembrance of what I ate that night, though the food was good—everyone assured everyone of that. Afterwards we drove in two cars to the theater. Laura insisted that she and I could go with Gunnar, leaving Miles to bring his sister. She seemed uneasy with Miles, and I wondered if he might be putting pressure on her against going to California. I wondered too what quarreling the brother and sister would do on the way to the theater. But there was no telling when we arrived and got out of the cars, hurrying through the rain to the lobby of the impressive gray stone building of the National Theater. Donia looked no more nor less baleful than usual.
In the marble lobby, we waited for the men to park the cars, and Laura made a dramatic figure in her long scarlet cape. She removed her hood and her hair shone glossy and dark beneath the light of chandeliers. All around us people were coming in out of the rain—a quiet, well-mannered audience of mixed ages, though perhaps with few of the very young for this particular nostalgic play. There were glances in Laura’s direction, and perhaps there were some who recognized her, but good manners prevailed and we were not disturbed.
When the men rejoined us, we went through glass doors and up red carpeted marble stairs, where busts of the famous looked down upon us from niches in the wall. These stairs were meant for someone dressed gloriously for the evening as Laura was dressed. She went up at Miles’s side, the cape flowing, her head held high. I saw Donia’s resentful glance as she and I climbed the stairs on either side of Gunnar.
The upper hall ran in a semicircle, and there were paintings on the walls. Our box had its own cloakroom and an attendant sold Miles programs and ushered us to our seats. Laura, Donia and I took the red chairs at the rail, with the men just behind us. Laura chose the seat nearest the audience, and she looked about the filling house with a certain regal arrogance that could only have been worn by a woman who knew her own importance. She was as conspicuous as the blue-curtained stage, and faces turned toward her as the audience settled into red-upholstered seats. Even those in the steep balcony looked down at her, and there was no question of which one of us held the curious interest of the theater. They pretended not to look, and I guessed that she had been recognized.
Behind me, Gunnar chuckled softly, pleased at the recognition. He leaned toward me. “This is what she was born for. She is nearly sixty, and there is not a woman in the house who can match her.”
I could agree wholeheartedly. “I think she’s wonderful,” I whispered back.
Behind Laura, Miles watched in glum disapproval, liking none of this. He heard my words and frowned at me, then bent toward his wife.
Before he could speak, I stopped him. “Let her have her moment in the spotlight. Perhaps she needs it more than we ordinary people can realize.”
The house lights began to dim. The old, old moment of theater magic was approaching. In the box across from us two women who had kept well back in the shadows came forward to sit beside the man at the rail. How different from Laura! The outer curtain rose to give way to the inner one and we could see that the head of a bear rug poked roguishly toward the audience from beneath the lower folds of curtain. There was a quieting of chatter, a stilling of rustled programs—the curtain parted and the scene of a house in Brooklyn early in the century was revealed.
It was, perhaps, a Brooklyn house with a Norwegian accent, and when they came onstage it seemed startling to hear the two conniving sisters speaking Norwegian. Nevertheless, while I didn’t understand a word, the comedy of the play caught me up. For a little while I could forget Kalfaret, forget that brass candlestick and Irene lying face down in the rain. Teddy Brewster made his famous dash up the stairs shouting, “Chararge!” in English as he stormed his own San Juan Hill, and the audience roared. The glass decanter played its deadly role, and the romance began to unfold.
During the long speeches I couldn’t understand, I sometimes watched Laura, and saw that she seemed as absorbed as a child. The glow of warm, pinkish-yellow light from the stage touched her face, her parted lips, reflected itself luminously in her eyes. She was reveling in this make-believe world that she knew so well, and I was glad that she could be drawn out of herself for a little while, and freed of whatever terror ruled her life.
In the shadows behind her, Miles sat motionless, seeming never to stir. He neither laughed nor applauded. Beside me, Donia was the most restless one in the box. She could not sit quietly in her seat, but wriggled about, staring at Laura, at me, and sometimes back into the box at her brother. I think she was scarcely aware of the affairs which progressed upon the stage.
When the curtain came down on Act I and the house lights went on, Gunnar leaned toward me. “Would you like to walk about? There is a refreshment room, if you care to—”
It was Donia who stopped him with one of her strange little cries. “Look!” she said breathlessly.
She was staring at Laura, and Gunnar and I looked at her too. She had not moved since the curtains had closed. She was unaware of the bustle in the theater, in the opposite boxes. Her eyes were fixed unblinkingly upon the blue curtain, and she was no longer charmed. Miles noticed and he stood up in the box and put his hand on her shoulder, bent toward her. She winced away from his touch.
“They were talking about murder down there,” she said softly. “This is a play which jokes about murder.”
“Of course,” Miles said, but his look upon her was wary. “You know this old chestnut very well.”
We stared at her, aghast at this sudden turn. I think Miles was about to take his own firm stand and insist that she stay and see it through, but Gunnar was quicker than the rest of us.
“Of course, Laura,” he said. “If the play is wrong for you, I am sorry. Of course you must not stay if it upsets you.”
She looked at him gratefully. “Thank you for understanding, Gunnar. This is something I can’t help. But I know what I must do now. You must come with us back to the house. You know how to run the projector, and—”
Miles broke in on her words. “Projector! Laura, what are you talking about?”
“I have to watch it! Miles, please don’t try to stop me. Now is the time! I have the film of The Whisperer. Gunnar will help us. Now—tonight. I want to run it through. I must, I must!”
It was Gunnar who quieted her. “I will come, if your husband permits. If it will help you in some way to watch this picture, then perhaps this is what you must do.”
Miles started to protest, but she would not listen. “I want Leigh to see the film,” she said.
“I’ve already seen it several times,” I told her, but she paid no attention. She was already making her way up the few steps that led out of the box. There was nothing to do but follow her. Miles was clearly angry, but he could not stop her.
We put on our coats and Laura went first in her scarlet cape. Playgoers parted before her. The very way she moved, swift and sure of herself, opened a way to let her through.
While we waited on the steps for the men to bring the cars. Donia drew a little apart, as if she disliked standing near that dramatically scarlet-clad figure. I was able to speak to Laura alone.
“Why are you doing this?”
Her eyes had a fixed, bright look, and she did not answer me.
“Isn’t it dangerous?” I persisted.
“If that’s so—” her lips barely formed the words, “then that’s how it must be.”
Outside, the rain had stopped, and while the lobby behind us was thronged with those who moved about between the acts, the drive before the theater was empty. The two men returned quickly with cars. Bergen streets glistened wet by lamplight as we followed them. On the mountain the funicular crawled upward like a great lighted worm, and among the clusters of bright lights along the hillside Kalfaret waited.
Kalfaret and The Whisperer.
Chapter 14
Long ago Laura had purchased expensive equipment for the showing of her films at home to certain select friends. Before she had left the States she had collected the films of several of her pictures, and had them transferred to more durable film. For a long while she had looked at none of these pictures, but now Gunnar set up the screen at one end of the living room, and Miles, glowering and reluctant, helped to move furniture.
Irene had left her bed by the time we reached the house. She was never one to coddle herself, and she came downstairs to see why we were home early. She seemed to have recovered well enough from the bump on her head, though like Miles she was clearly disturbed over Laura’s plans.
While she and I were arranging chairs for the “audience,” she spoke to me in a low voice.
“You know what this means, Miss Hollins. There will be hysteria tonight. She will make herself thoroughly ill.”
“Why does she want to do this?” I asked.
“I think she hopes to smoke someone out of his cover. That can be a possible reason. Perhaps that’s what she intended when she put on that little performance with your help the other night. Only she failed.”
“I don’t understand,” I objected. “If she knows perfectly well who is behind what’s been happening, why is there any need to smoke someone out? She has only to point her finger.”
“Perhaps she’s not as sure as she thinks,” Irene said. “Or perhaps she intends a wearing away, a breaking down—a turning of the tables. I don’t think it will work.”
“Irene,” I said, “who struck you down in the garden this afternoon?”
She would not meet my eyes, but she had chosen her course. “No one struck me down. I stumbled and hit my head.”
“And the candlestick?”
“I was carrying the candlestick.”
“In the garden in the rain?”
“Perhaps you have a better theory?”
I hadn’t, and when Laura sat down, I took the chair next to her with a greater uneasiness than ever. Miles was on her other side, with Donia next to him, while Irene sat beside me. When Gunnar, whose post was at the equipment behind us, turned off the lights, there was a slight commotion. Donia bounced up from her chair, crying out that she couldn’t bear to watch this beastly film, and ran into the hall. Miles went after her and brought her grimly back to the room. After that, she whimpered softly now and then, and when the film began to roll I could see that she had ducked her head and was not looking at the screen.
This was a picture I had seen often enough, but never under such circumstances, and I found myself moved and fascinated by what was going on before my eyes. The young Laura walked across the screen, beautiful, for all her subdued makeup, and there was an aching in me for all young beauty which must be lost so soon. The actor who had played Helen Bradley’s husband had been young at the time, but he was dead now, and that added to the sense of another day, another time, a sense of ghostly presence.
The little maid—that bit actress who had never made her way into larger parts—appeared on her knees, polishing the fatal iron doorstop. Her hair was frizzy, her roundly plump face expressed constant fright.
Beside me, Laura’s hand slipped through the crook of my arm, and I could feel her fingers pressing into my flesh. I covered her hand with my own, trying to still the emotion I knew was rising in her. Irene was right. It was likely to be Laura Worth whom the watching of this film was most likely to upset. The other night she had been able to speak Helen Bradley’s lines when we’d run through those few scenes. But this was very different.
The photography had been remarkable in the picture, and in spite of our small screen, the mood created by the play of light and shadow added to the intensity of emotion portrayed by the actors. I knew the moment when the first whispering voice would come out of nowhere, and I felt Laura’s fingers tighten upon my arm.
“Listen …” said the voice on the screen, and then more faintly, “Listen …” On the stairs Helen Bradley gripped the rail and looked as though she might faint and roll down the steps. She clung to the rail, supported herself, and managed to descend to the gloomy hall below.
The sound of that voice seemed to echo through the real room in which we sat, but no one in the small audience moved or made a sound. Not even Laura. Only her cold fingers on my arm told me what she was enduring, suffering.
The fourth character in the play was on the screen now—the distant cousin of Robert Bradley, who was visiting in the house, and was in love with Helen. He had been played by a minor actor, who, like the maid, had disappeared from the screen. He was the villain of the piece, of course. I studied his young, rather ominous good looks, but they meant nothing to me. I had never seen him in anything again.
The scene was played where the young, nervous maid dropped her loaded tray in the presence of Robert Bradley. Her round, lugubrious face contorted in fear and she burst into tears, throwing her apron over her frizzy head.
A few chairs away Donia wriggled as she had done at the theater, and her creaking chair played a counterpoint to the eerie sound track that was an accompaniment to scenes that had no dialogue. Even Donia was watching the screen now.
It was strange that a story so familiar should be able to grip us all again as it had done when we first saw it. Just as we can read a book for the second time and be caught up in the drama, even when we know the ending, so it was with this picture. Once I turned my head to look back at Gunnar and saw his face bathed in the ghostly light that was
reflected from the screen. He saw me turn toward him and nodded to me as if in reassurance.
But nothing happened. Nothing really happened. Whoever knew the secret of another whispering voice sat utterly still among us and betrayed nothing. All was quiet until the scene where Helen Bradley once more came down the stairs in that long, slow shot where we watched in something close to agony, watched her go into that Victorian parlor where her husband lay dead upon the floor—that scene in which the doorstop was absent as a prop, because it had been used for a more deadly real-life purpose before this scene was put on film.
The camera moved about the parlor, and Laura gasped softly beside me. It panned from a seashell on a whatnot shelf, from the clasped hands of a china paperweight on a table, to the carpet and a pair of feet lying inert with the toes up. Slowly it began to move up the length of that prone body—and suddenly there was a dreadful sound in the room. A sound that was not on the screen.
Laura’s hand was gone from my arm. She was on her feet, crying out her terrible words. “I killed him! I killed him! It’s because of me that he died! I killed him!”
Gunnar turned off the projection machine and sprang for the lights. Miles took her by the shoulders and shook her sharply, shook her into gasping sobs.
“I knew this would happen,” Irene said grimly.