The light was only a flickering redness, but as she spoke the curtains at the window caught in a flare of flame.
“That does it,” Michael muttered, struggling to stand. “The outside of the house is soaked, but inside it’s as dry as sawdust. It will go up in a second. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Get out!” She caught at his injured arm, heard him groan, and transferred her weight to support him as he swayed. “We can’t just walk out and leave the house to burn!”
“How can we stop it? The wood is dry with rot, and there are all these papers and books. Someone will see the flames and call the fire department. We must be away from here before anyone comes.”
“I can’t leave.”
“You aren’t afraid of-what’s out there, are you? It, or its master, will be too canny to stick around. The place will be swarming with people in five minutes. There couldn’t be a safer time for us.”
“It’s not that. I can’t leave…her.”
She was surprised to feel wetness on her face. Michael’s own face, bloodless with pain and shock, softened. They looked at the huddled body, roused to a terrible imitation of movement by the flickering light of the fire, which had seized avidly on the wooden walls.
“She’s dead,” Michael said. “There’s no doubt of that, Linda-I know. What else can you do for her? It’s purifying-fire.” He added, with a glance around the strange little room, “I know, she thought she was doing good. All the same, it seems fitting, somehow, that this should burn… Linda, please.”
His weight was heavy against her; the fact that he made no mention of his own need was the strongest appeal of all. With one last look at the still body, she turned, bracing him; as they passed through the door, the flames leaped from walls to floor. Half the room was ablaze. As they went down the passageway, Linda wondered why Andrea’s body had looked so small. Shrunken, almost, as if part of its substance had been sucked out.
One good look at Michael’s arm made Linda forget her other concerns, but he wouldn’t let her do much, except apply a bandage to stop the bleeding, and arrange a rough sling. A swig of brandy from the bottle on the table brought some of the color back to his face. It also brought him to his feet.
“Take the bottle,” he said, thrusting it at her. “Hurry. God, I can hear the fire now, it’s not raining hard enough to stop it. Let’s go, Linda.”
She lingered, looking affectionately at the old kitchen.
“I hate to see it go without making a fight to save it. The house is two hundred years old.”
“Yes, you’re a fighter, aren’t you. But pick your causes, for God’s sake. Do you want to be found here, with the house ablaze, a dead body, and signs of what the newspapers will be delighted to refer to as unholy practices? The least that can happen is that I’ll go to jail and Gordon will lock you up for the rest of your life. I can just see what his tame psychiatrists could do with this mess.”
It was brutal but effective. She turned, without another word, and started toward the door.
“Wait a minute,” Michael said. “The cats. We can’t leave them inside.”
“They can get out, through the cellar.”
“Just in case…”
Michael drew the bolts on the back door and threw it open. The rain was falling gently now, as if spent by its effort.
“Come on,” he said, and led the way to the front of the house.
II
They made it, but with only seconds to spare. As the car skidded onto the paved road and turned, they heard sirens and saw the flashing red lights of fire engines coming the other way.
Linda was driving. Michael had tried to, but the effort of turning the car in the narrow lane, which was now a bog of mud, was too much for him; he blacked out, over the wheel, with the first movement.
“Stupid,” he said hazily, as she took his place. “Too dangerous, on the highway…I hope you can drive. I forgot to ask.”
“I hope so too. It’s funny, though,” she added, nursing the wheel and the brake as the car curtsied coyly into a rut, “how it comes back to you. I drove one of my boyfriends’ jalopies through an entire Cleveland winter. Ice and snow and mud and…woops.”
He didn’t answer, either to commend her skill or to make suggestions; she knew he was fighting to stay conscious, and she did her best to avoid jolting him. When she swung onto the highway, she was conscious of an absurdly warming glow of pride. It was a long time since she had done anything for herself. Some of the dependence was inevitable when you were married to a man as wealthy as Gordon; you didn’t mend your own socks or scrub scorched pans. Even so-hadn’t Gordon overdone the servant bit? He didn’t do anything himself, except for the exercise necessary to preserve his splendid physical condition. He didn’t even drive a car; he hired the best chauffeurs that were to be had. He didn’t build a fire in the fireplace, or plant a bulb, or groom a horse. The moral value of work was a myth, of course; or was it? Surely there was a healthy feeling of satisfaction in doing some small, needed job and doing it well: cleaning a dirty kitchen, mending a piece of broken furniture-getting a car out of a muddy back lane.
She thought Michael had lost consciousness, he was so still; but once they were on the paved road, he spoke.
“You’ve got a good, efficient fire department. There they come now. Maybe they can save the house after all.”
“I hope so. Don’t think I’m sentimental-”
“What’s wrong with being sentimental?”
“Well, this is no time for it,” she admitted. “I don’t know what you want to do now; I didn’t think about anything except getting away from there. But you’ve got to see a doctor, Michael, right away.”
“Sounds good,” Michael said.
“Doctor Gold lives down the next street,” she said, her eyes on the road.
“Isn’t he your little pal? The one I met?”
“Yes.”
“I think we’ll pass him up.”
“But, Michael, he’s the closest.”
“Too close. He’d be on the phone to Gordon before he did anything else.”
“I could stay in the car.”
“Alone? No.”
“I can’t stand knowing how much it hurts you,” she said unsteadily. The car swerved.
“Keep your eyes on the road… Don’t waste your sympathy. I am just about to pass out… Thank God.”
“There must be a doctor in the next town,” Linda said, putting her foot down.
“No, wait…”Michaelroused himself; his voice sounded miles away. “Whatever you do, don’t panic. Keep at the speed limit, we can’t risk…a wreck, or a cop. One thing to do…obvious…”
“Michael…Michael!”
“Don’t wreck the car,” he said; weak as it was, his voice was amused, and Linda was conscious of a strange constriction somewhere in the region of her diaphragm. “Don’t stop…Put a couple of dozen miles between us and the house…”
She heard his sigh of exhaled breath as his head fell back against the seat.
The drive was almost too much of a challenge; it was one of the worst jobs she had ever undertaken. Terror is strong and breath-stopping, but it is usually brief; it passes quickly. Fear, the kind that had haunted her for months, has its own built-in anesthesia. And when despair is deepest there is no need to struggle, only to endure. What made the drive so bad was the need to keep constantly on the alert, to anticipate, not only the normal hazards of the road, but any unexpected, almost unimagined supranormal danger. She realized that the worst kind of fear is fear for someone else. She damned herself for involving Michael in her danger, and speculated wildly as to how she could extricate him-if it wasn’t already too late.
Through it all she drove steadily, surely, never taking her eyes from the road. The torrential rains had flooded out many sections, and she drove through shallow sheets of water at a crawl, her throat tight with fear of flooding the engine. But the worst moment was the roadblock.
A tree was down on t
he road ahead; but she didn’t know that, not at first, she saw only the barriers and the flashing lights of the police car.
Her foot hit the brake and her hand fumbled for the gear lever. There was a side road, a block or two back… She realized the stupidity of that move, just in time, and brought the car to a sedate stop. She had barely time to reach over and pull Michael’s jacket across his slung arm as the police officer came up to the side of the car.
She rolled down the window.
“What’s the trouble?” she demanded, with the ordinary annoyance of an innocent motorist who is delayed.
“Tree across the road. The crew is working on it, but you’ll be better off going around; it’ll take some time.” The man’s eyes moved past her, to the silent figure sprawled across the other seat. “Something wrong, miss? Need any help?”
He was very young, the policeman; his voice was kind. Momentarily Linda fought the urge to break down and tell him the truth. A doctor, a nice safe hospital for Michael…Then she saw the boy’s nostrils quiver, and she realized that the brandy bottle must be leaking. Either that, or Michael had taken more than she thought.
“That must have been quite a party,” the policeman said. “Your husband, ma’am?”
“What makes you so sure we’re married?” Linda asked, with an attempt at a smile.
He was young, but he wasn’t stupid. Pushing his cap back, he smiled back at her.
“I didn’t see your ring at first,” he explained, indicating her left hand, which was taut on the wheel. “But, you know, it’s a funny thing; we see a lot of drunks, you can imagine. Sometimes a girl’s date passes out, but usually it’s a married guy.”
“That must give you rather a jaundiced view of marriage.”
“No, not really. Oh-oh, I get it. You mean the husbands are driven to drink?” The young man laughed. He had pink cheeks and even, white teeth, and he was obviously bored with his dull post. “Well, maybe. But what I always figured was, I figured the boyfriends were more anxious to look good. It’s not a very nice thing to do, pass out on a date and make her drive you home.”
“I’m sure you’d never do a thing like that, whether you were married to the girl or not,” Linda said. Every nerve in her body was screaming for haste, but she couldn’t show it. If she gave him any cause to ask for her driver’s license, they were finished.
“Well, I’ll tell you, ma’am, you pull a few bodies out of the wrecks and you get to realize it isn’t worth it. Well, I guess you don’t need a lecture; you look like you’d never had a drink in your life.”
“Thank you,” Linda said sweetly. She batted her lashes at him. “I certainly haven’t had one tonight.”
“No, I could tell that. If you had-well, I’d have wanted to stop you from driving. It’s even more dangerous on a bad night like this. You sure you don’t need any help with your husband?”
“Thank you, but I can manage.” Michael stirred and muttered; and Linda said quickly, “I’d better get him home to bed. You say there’s a detour?”
“Yes, ma’am. Two blocks back, you turn right, then left at the next corner, and you’re on Main Street…”
She didn’t need the directions, but she nodded her thanks and pretended to listen intently. She turned the car carefully under his benevolent but critical eyes, and started back; wondering, as she did so, why she had the urge to hide their tracks. She was acting as if they might be objects of an ordinary search, instead of a quest by something not limited by human senses. Was that her intelligence, struggling against superstition, or simply overcaution? She gave it up, with a shrug that was a little desperate. Rational or not, the purpose was achieved; that nice boy would not think of her and her drunken bum of a husband if anyone came looking for a crazy girl fleeing with her lover.
Her lover. She drove on, automatically, through the night. Once, at her worst, she had prayed that she would never love anyone again. Love had betrayed her too often. With her father, who had died and left her, and her mother, who had never given a damn about her because she was a girl, and had “all these funny ideas.” And, after she had gone to him for the security her childhood had lacked, with Gordon. He had not only failed, he had used love as a weapon against her, a blindfold to hide his true nature, a spy that betrayed her own weaknesses. Love? It was a chameleon word with a thousand meanings. There were as many kinds of love as there were human beings-a hundred times more, because every human being had that many different feelings which he called by the same name.
Beside her, Michael moaned and shifted. His head dropped onto her shoulder. She adjusted her weight and kept on driving, eyes steady on the road.
When she first saw him, she regarded him not as a man but as a ladder by means of which she might climb out of the pit where Gordon held her prisoner. She had meant to ensnare his senses so that his reasoning faculties would be blinded, and he would obey her demands with the uncritical partisanship which that kind of “love” induced in the victim. It was a blindness with which she was only too familiar.
Not that she had meant to tell him the truth. Some tale of conventional “mental cruelty” would have done the trick-or so she thought. She knew now that she would never have caught this man with anything so crude. She might more safely have appealed to his sense of compassion. But that was a double-edged weapon, too easily turned against her-“poor girl, she needs help but doesn’t know it; we must hurt her for her own good.” Gordon had already used that, and it had almost worked. But that was Michael’s strength; no appeal that was purely emotional could convince him completely. He had a critical brain, critical even of himself, and it functioned. Even now, though he “loved” her-whatever he might mean by that word-he was still asking questions. He had come to her defense not because of “love” but because the tireless critical brain had produced facts that cracked his first predilection in favor of Gordon and Gordon’s explanations.
With that kind of intelligence she had no quarrel; in fact, it might be the only solid thing in a shifting universe, and the one quality above all others that had made her turn to him. But love, whatever else it was, was not a sterile agreement of similar minds. And, after the last agonizing months, she was no longer sure of her capacity to give anything beyond that.
The inert mass beside her stirred again, and she started.
“Are you awake?”
“I’m not sure… Where are we?”
“About halfway to the city. I haven’t been planning; I’ve just been driving.”
“Pull over as soon as you can find a place.”
They were approaching a town, and she found the parking lot of an all-night diner. She left the engine idling, pushed down the parking brake, and turned to Michael.
He was upright and aware, but the dull look in his eyes alarmed her.
“You’ve got to have a doctor. I’ll ask, at the diner.”
“Wait a minute. I’ve got to think… What sort of story are we going to tell a doctor?”
“But it’s nothing the police need to…Oh, I see. He’ll know it was an animal, won’t he? He’ll start fussing about rabies. He’ll want us to report it, describe where it happened, so the police can check. If we said the dog belonged to a friend of ours-”
“He may wonder what kind of friends we have, that they didn’t call in their family doctor. Lying is complicated, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes telling the truth is more complicated. Michael, we’ll have to risk it. Maybe he’ll be sleepy and bored and won’t care.”
“Yes, we’ll have to risk it.”
“Does it hurt terribly?”
“Yes, damn it, it hurts. But that’s not what’s bothering me. I can’t risk being incapacitated. Don’t you understand? What happened tonight was the first round. And we lost. You don’t think he’ll give up now, do you?”
“No. But I wouldn’t say we lost. We got away.”
“Leaving one dead on the field of battle. She lost. She’s dead because she lost. Whatever she was doing, or th
ought she was doing, it failed.”
“That couldn’t have been part of his plan. He didn’t know she’d be there.”
“I don’t know what his plan is, that’s why I feel so helpless. But I’m beginning to suspect that my involvement isn’t coincidental. Why he’s got it in for me I don’t know, but he asked for me; he did everything he could to throw us together. He has something in mind. And until we figure out what, we’re fighting blind. Let’s locate that doctor. You go and ask while I try to think of some disarming lie.”
The doctor was suspicious and hard to soothe. Groggy and querulous at first, he woke up completely after a look at Michael’s injuries, and only the latter’s quick imagination kept him from calling the police. Michael managed to suggest a drunken party and considerable provocation; the smell of brandy on his breath went a long way toward convincing the doctor that the affair had been an ordinarily middle-class brawl, with possibilities of scandal, in which he was better not involved. They left as soon as they could get away.
“Well,” Linda said, when they were back in the car, “if the police make any inquiries, we won’t be hard to trace this far.”
Michael shook his head. The pills the doctor had given him were working. He looked much better.
“I don’t think we need to worry about the police. Not that we can go to them for help; our story is too wild. And if we’d been found there, with Andrea dead and the house blazing, we’d have had some embarrassing questions to answer. But a common garden-variety scandal can’t be Gordon’s aim. He won’t turn us in, and nobody else knows we were at Andrea’s.”
“I’ll bet the police would love to have some witnesses as to what happened there.”
“Not even that. Even if they find the-evidence intact, the logical conclusion will be that Andrea was carried away by her histrionics and had a heart attack. There wasn’t a mark on her. In fact-that may have been just what did happen.”
“You don’t believe-”
“I don’t know what to believe.”
“The dog. It was real enough.”
The Dark on the Other Side Page 18
