Shades of Evil

by Cave, Hugh

  When all of it was clear of the water, floating on the surface, it drifted across the beach and onto the lawn. There it stopped and swirled into something resembling a human figure, and with its head atilt seemed to study the building in front of it. Beginning at the ground floor, its gaze—if it possessed anything like eyes to gaze with —traveled slowly up the face of the structure as though reading the contents of the verandas.

  At this hour on a Sunday night the verandas of Lakeside Manor were usually deserted. Not everyone went to bed early, of course, but those still up would not be out looking at the lake; they would be watching the news or a movie on television. One or two might even be reading a book. Tonight only the Broderick porch showed any sign of life, and the thing on the lawn could not have seen into that from where it stood so far below.

  It just might, however, have seen the curl of smoke from Tom's cigarette, or from his mouth as he exhaled. Against the dark sky the smoke, to one with keen enough vision, might have been visible as it drifted out through the screen.

  The thing began to change shape again. No longer human, it rose from the grass and floated upward. It was the size of a man but kept changing shape as it rose, the way a small cloud might change if caught in wavering currents of air.

  One moment it was an outsized snakebird—there were many in the marshes here—with serpentine neck characteristically darting forward and back. Then it was not a snakebird but a snake, coiling to strike. Then in succession it became a round ball slowly spinning, a bat with lazy wings, a misty nothing at all.

  Until it got there.

  Now it assumed human shape again, but the misty figure was no longer pale; it was dark. Dark as the night, almost. So nearly so that Tom Broderick, relaxed on his chair with his cigarette between his fingers, did not become aware of it until it had fully taken shape outside his screen and begun to filter through the mesh. Even then all he saw was a dark shadow, human in form, gliding toward him.

  Rising in haste, Tom uttered a grunt of alarm and dropped his cigarette onto the veranda carpet. "What the hell," he said, and then his eyes bulged with fear as the advancing thing, though still dark as oil fire smoke, became more human in shape . . . and developed a face.

  At least, it had human features. But Tom had never seen such a countenance before, even in his wildest liquor-inspired nightmares!

  The eyes in this advancing death mask were aglow with some hellish fire that seemed capable of reducing him to a cinder. The mouth was a wide-open leer of hate in which the teeth were white fangs framing a bottomless hole. And the whole hideous thing kept moving. Its outlines writhed as though subject to shifting internal pressures. "There's an evil force inside it fighting in fury to get out" was the thought that flashed into Tom's mind.

  But it was a face. And despite the blazing eyes and hate-warped mouth, it was a human face—one he recognized. "My God!" Tom croaked, stumbling backward with his hands upflung to fend the creature off.

  The awful mouth seemed to snarl in reply, though he was sure it made no sound. Wildly retreating, Tom knocked over the chair he had been sitting on.

  Behind the chair, the sliding glass door to the living room was open. He tripped over the low sill and went sprawling through to land on his back on the living-room carpet.

  As the smoky figure flowed over him, he threw up his hands and clawed at it, frantically striving to keep it at bay. A yell of total terror erupted from him now, with all the air in his heaving chest behind it.

  When the outcry ended he was still on his back, feebly struggling under an amorphous cloud of writhing darkness. The face was there in the cloud, but fading now and seemingly about to disappear.

  No matter. It had accomplished its purpose. Above the cloud Tom's hands twitched helplessly, like the upthrust white wings of a wading bird that was caught in a pool of black pitch.

  The bedroom door flew open then in response to his scream. Rushing out in her nightgown, his wife shrilled in panic. "Tom! Tom! What's the matter?"

  "Will, what was that?"

  Lynne Kimball sat up in bed, gazing wide-eyed at the wall between Will Platt's bedroom and the apartment next door. She was naked.

  Will sat up, too, and put an arm across her shoulders. "A man yelling, it sounded like."

  They were silent then, both of them, listening.

  It had begun in the kitchen, when he kissed her. Their drinks replenished, they returned to the living room and sat together on the sofa. In a moment, the drinks forgotten, they were lying side by side, each seeking to find out whether the casual kiss in the kitchen was something to build on.

  It was.

  "Shall we go into the bedroom?" Lynne asked after a while.

  "Lets."

  He began to unbutton his sport shirt as he followed her across the living room, was out of it by the time they stood beside the bed. Gazing at him, she said quietly, "Everything, Will?" and he was startled. In the twenty-seven years he had been married to Victoria, nothing like this had happened even once.

  Was it happening? Was this beautiful girl-woman really standing before him with her hands raised to unzip her dress? Or was he dreaming it?

  He nodded in reply to her question. When she did step out of the dress and nervously shucked her bra and panties he made up his mind to find out at once just how real she was. Because if he were going to commit to a new relationship, it had to be one he was sure of.

  She stood before him naked, a lovely thing with a solemn little smile on her lips. With the breasts and tummy of a teenager. The arms and legs of a girl athlete. In silence she watched him finish undressing, then stepped forthrightly into his arms and lifted her mouth to his and held it there.

  When the kiss ended and he raised his head, he saw that her eyes were closed. She was breathing hard. From waist to knees there was a slippery film of moisture between their bodies.

  He eased her onto the big double bed and sat beside her, looking at her. "Have you read all of that book of mine yet?"

  She nodded.

  "The story called Alauda?"

  "Yes, Will."

  "You didn't dislike that story?"

  "I liked it very much."

  "Even the love scene?"

  "Especially the love scene."

  Was she being truthful? He had to know. Had to know now, before this promising adventure reached a point of no return. "I want to be the man in that story," he said. "I never have been such a man—never had the chance to be—but I want to be now, with you, unless you say no."

  She lifted her hands to his face, drew his head down and kissed him. "I can't imagine not liking anything you might do to me," she said.

  But he lay beside her first, wanting to be sure. Wanting her to feel as right with him as he suddenly felt with her. Though it had happened very quickly between them, it was no light thing. He was in some ways a deeply religious man. Something more than chance, he already felt, had sent him to the pool that day when she was swimming there alone.

  He held her in his arms, lightly caressing her body with his fingertips, her face with his lips. And then they heard the sound from the next apartment and were startled into sitting up.

  They listened for a repetition. It didn't come. What came was the sound, muffled by the wall, of a woman screaming.

  "That's Bee Broderick, next door," Will said. "She's not the screaming kind. I'd better check."

  He slid quickly from the bed and into his clothes. Lynne was dressed and right behind him as he strode from the room. Down the hall they went to the door of 603, and Will banged it with his fist. No sound came from the apartment now. But no one opened the door, either.

  He grasped the knob and found the door unlocked. Taking the brief entrance hall in three strides, he froze to a halt and stared at Bee Broderick, kneeling beside something on the floor at the far end of the living room, just inside the open door to the veranda. She wore a nightgown and was quietly sobbing.

  He halted beside her and looked down. The thing on the flo
or was her husband, Tom—on his back, mouth and eyes wide open, face convulsed into something barely human. Will knelt, gently easing the woman aside. He reached for the man's wrist. After a few seconds he dropped the wrist and put an ear to Tom's chest. He could detect no pulse, no heartbeat, no sound of breathing.

  Still on his knees he looked about the room, then at the veranda. Nothing seemed out of order except an overturned veranda chair and an unbroken length of cigarette ash on the green carpet. He looked at the dead man's wife and reached for her hand.

  "Bee, what happened?"

  "I heard him call out." Her voice was barely loud enough. "I was in bed. I ran out here. He was like this with . . . with something dark on top of him. Dark like smoke."

  "Smoke?"

  "Like smoke but alive. I don't know what it was. When it saw me, it flowed out onto the veranda and just . . . just disappeared through the screen. He was still alive then, trying to tell me something."

  "Tell you what?"

  She shook her head. "One word. Just one word. He said it over and over. It sounded like 'bat' but he was dying; he hardly had any voice left."

  "Bat?"

  "I think so. I'm not sure. I think that's what he was saying. Over and over again, just that one word. Bat."

  7

  Jurzak

  Lakeside Manor was all but deserted. The snowbirds had gone back north and now, following the death of Tom Broderick the week before, most residents left had moved to a nearby motel.

  Not for them the terror of continuing to dwell in a haunted condominium where two dogs, a woman and a man had mysteriously perished within the past three weeks. They would spend their nights, at least, at the motel until the killer was found.

  The Ellstroms were among those who had departed. They might be high on the creature's list, they decided, because they, along with Haydn Clay, had been the first to see it. Pearl Gautier, the former nurse who had been Connie Abbott's best friend, had also decided it was unsafe to linger, especially for a woman living alone.

  Estelle Quigley, the no-nonsense former restaurant owner from Massachusetts, had surprised Will Platt by leaving. He had thought her a tough old girl who would stick it out. LeRoy Abbott had caused no lifted eyebrows at all by departing. Why should he remain after the murder of his wife and the humiliating disclosure that she had been another man's mistress?

  Remaining were Carl Helpin and his wife, Haydn Clay, and manager Ed Lawson. Clay and Lawson spent much of their time together in a rowboat on the lake. Bee Broderick lingered too, determined to find the cause of her husband's death. And, of course, the two whose sudden friendship had set in motion a wave of gossip throughout the condo—Will Platt and Lynne Kimball.

  "You know something, Will Platt?" said the girl-woman in Will's arms. "We've been sleeping together just a week now, and I feel more married to you than I ever felt with my husband."

  "I've been telling you. It wasn't an accident that we met at the pool that day. I have deep convictions about such things."

  "Have you, really?"

  Will drew her closer and kissed her. It was two in the morning and they were in bed in his apartment. Sometimes they used hers, sometimes his; it didn't seem to matter. Actually they were not in bed, either, but on it, naked, with nothing over them. Both were accustomed to warm climates. They could, of course, have closed the windows and turned on the air conditioning, but they preferred the windows open.

  "What I think, lady," Will said, "is that the good Lord is trying to prove something with us."

  "Prove what?"

  "I think he's fed up with the way things are going in this world of his. The increasing violence. The way such violence is being accepted as a normal way of life—if you don't like something, organize a gang and trash it or kill it. He didn't expect this kind of behavior, I'm sure. When he made man and woman, he planned on their loving each other, the way we're doing right this minute."

  "I'll buy that," Lynne said. Snuggling closer, she let a hand wander over his body, just barely touching him with the tips of her fingers. It was a thing she had never done with her husband. Very early in her life with him she had discovered that his idea of making love to a woman was to get himself between her legs as rapidly as possible, even if it made her feel like a punching bag. Will Platt, on the other hand, liked to touch and be touched, and both of them, in the short time they had been doing it, had discovered a surprising variety of ways to please each other.

  "The minute I saw you at the pool," he said presently, "I felt something I'd never felt in my life before. Not even with Vicky, when she was young and lovely and I thought I'd go crazy if I couldn't marry her. With you I felt—"

  "What?"

  "A certainty. We were being brought together for a reason. We were exactly right for each other."

  She put her lips against the side of his neck and said in a low voice, "Thank you. I felt something like that too. I love you, Will Platt."

  "I love you. How could I help it?"

  But he had problems elsewhere.

  The story in the Sunday newspaper the day of Tom Broderick's death had done him no good at all. The police and the county sheriff's people, reading it, had soaked up the insinuations concerning his possible connection with the mystery. In the week since the latest attack of the lake thing, he had been interviewed three times by different investigators.

  A homicide investigator named Jurzak from the sheriff's department had been the most difficult. Short, fat, with a face resembling a small gray watermelon, he had at first seemed to be the one most easily disposed of, but behind his watery gray eyes and dull manner lay a brilliant imagination.

  "Tell me about your wife, Mr. Platt."

  "What?"

  "Your wife, who ran away some weeks ago. When did she disappear, actually?"

  "March twenty-ninth."

  "That long ago, was it?" Jurzak took time to adjust his bulk more comfortably on the sofa and stare at his knees for a moment. "Anyway, tell me about her."

  Will felt a twinge of apprehension. "What is there to say?"

  "Well now, it seems you've told others she wasn't acting just right when you returned with her from—where was it?"

  "Jamaica."

  "Right. Jamaica. Where you were into some kind of voodoo business for your next book, no?"

  Will hesitated. No one here knew his real reason for going to Jamaica. "No. That was pure speculation on the part of the man who wrote the newspaper story. I was worried about her when we returned, however."

  "Why?"

  "She wasn't herself."

  "Could you be a little more specific, Mr. Platt?"

  "She seemed troubled. Something was making her edgy and nervous."

  "Then she left you."

  "Then she left me."

  Jurzak's hands were on his knees. His gaze slowly ascended from the hairy backs of them to Will's face. "Before she began acting edgy, Mr. Platt, how did the two of you get along? Any problems?"

  "We had our disagreements at times. Nothing serious."

  "I hear you're pretty friendly with someone else now. A woman here in the building."

  Will felt sure his shrug was convincing. "She lived in Jamaica for a time. We find things to talk about. If you know this building, you know most of the talk is about bridge and golf."

  "Nothing between you, eh?"

  "Nothing between us. I'm still a married man hoping to find my wife."

  "You hear anything at all from that agency in Miami?"

  "They phone me every few days."

  "But nothing to report, eh? No word about her from Los Angeles, where you thought she might go?"

  Will shook his head.

  The homicide investigator looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, "Do you have any idea, Mr. Platt, what might have caused the deaths of Mr. Broderick and Mrs. Abbott? And those two dogs?"

  "No, I don't."

  "There wasn't a mark on any of them to show what they died from. Seems to me it might be sort of u
p your alley, with you writing so much about West Indian voodoo and such."

  "I'm a novelist, that's all. I don't practice what I write about. I mean, it almost sounds as if you're accusing me of . . ."

  "No, no. Just wondering if you've run into anything like this before—in your research or folk stories, whatever."

  "I haven't. I'm as puzzled as you are."

  Jurzak departed then. Even shook hands in a friendly way and ventured his opinion that the mystery of Heron Lake would soon be unraveled, with so many investigations now in progress. His presence remained after his departure, however, and for the rest of that day Will kept trying to recall exactly what each of them had said.

  I should have used a hidden tape recorder, he thought. Or would he have smelled it out somehow?

  Three days after his conversation with Will Platt, Jurzak talked with Carl Helpin. The best way to learn the worst about the Manor's residents was to win the confidence of a man most of them disliked, he felt.

  "I understand you've been in the building about as long as anyone, Mr. Helpin. Maybe you can help me with the backgrounds of some of these people."

  They made an odd pair sitting there face to face in the Helpin living room—both short, Helpin heavy-shouldered but otherwise scrawny, Jurzak fat all over. On a chair some distance from them, Helpin's wife Nicola worked at needlepoint.

  "Let's start with that writer fellow on the top floor," Jurzak suggested. "What's your opinion of him, Mr. Helpin?"

  "Platt's nobody to waste your time on. Turns out a bunch of tripe about voodoo, ESP, sorcery, and stuff like that. My guess is he makes most of it up."

  "You've read it?"

  "You must be kidding."

  "You would discount him as a suspect, then?"

  "I sure wouldn't put him near the top of the list."

  The fat man placed his pudgy hands on his knees and gazed at them. "Who would you put at the top, Mr. Helpin?"

  "Our manager, Lawson, and Haydn Clay in 301."

  "Why those two?"