The Menace Within

by Ursula Curtiss

  “Be right back,” said Sweet abruptly, and got out of the truck into the falling snow. He looked quite at home here, with his confident carriage and air of brisk purpose; he might have been a patron going back to retrieve his wife’s gloves.

  Along with a few brilliant ojos and a long display case of Indian jewelry, the lobby contained a telephone booth. Sweet dropped in two of the dimes taken from the girl’s purse—with all her change confiscated she could do him no harm at the crossroads booth if and when she escaped from the bedroom—and dialed.

  Patch’s number rang vainly. Either his wife had gone to stay with friends or relatives during his absence or Patch, anticipating his unencumbered getaway and Sweet’s reaction to it, had instructed her not to answer.

  Sweet slammed the receiver onto its rest, contrived a civil smile for the white-haired woman who glanced at him from behind the display case, and walked out into the snow again, his mind roaming and ranging. Like most manipulators, he had a nimble and fertile brain, a natural talent for turning events to his own use —but only when the initial scheme was his to begin with. This dangerous mess, far removed from his familiar world of casual thievery and double-dealing and intermittent involvement with drugs, had been thrust upon him with no warning whatever.

  Fleetingly and for the first time, he saw his protective attitude toward Claude over the years for the near-fear it actually was. The effort not to look further at this had a steadying effect, and by the time he reached the truck he had said to himself that the current situation contained two men, a girl, and a child too young to give any kind of testimony.

  Wasn’t there, if he moved fast, a workable equation here?

  “I’ll find it, thank you,” said Lucy Pettit haughtily of the apartment key for which she had been rummaging unsuccessfully. She snatched her bag away from Justin’s offered hand and, before he could stop her, upended it over her snowy doorstep.

  A considerable number of objects plopped into the furry white, the smaller and harder ones disappearing at once. Justin bent and ruffled through the snow, Lucy meanwhile anchoring herself to the doorknob with an occasional outward weave, and retrieved two sets of keys and a wallet; anything else, he thought a trifle punitively, could if necessary await the spring thaw.

  By means of an impulsive detour on the way here he had established that Amanda’s house was dark, as was the Lopezes’, and her car gone. He had now begun to think that Mrs. Balsam’s telephone might be out of order, and it would be reassuring to drive up there, snow or no snow; very possibly there would be lights still on, and Amanda’s car might even be parked in front. He knew this sudden quest to be irrational, even obsessive, but there it was.

  First he had to get Lucy settled. It was she who had persuaded Justin to the magicians’ party, but he could scarcely leave her in a condition to fall or otherwise harm herself. It was a wonder, he thought as he maneuvered her inside, that the living room didn’t shock her sober: It was all creams and whites except for an abstract painting in pink and pimento red, a burnt orange butterfly chair, a daffodil lampshade over a base of Prussian blue.

  Lucy sat instantly down in the orange chair and gazed dazedly at the table beside it. When Justin asked, “Will you be all right, Lucy? Will you go straight to bed?” she said, “Certainly,” and attempted to light a white cigarette filter with a match.

  This seemed to bring her situation home to her. Her eyes brimmed. “You can’t wait to be rid of me.”

  Don’t be silly. That was deadly stuff we drank, and I think the best—”

  “I don’t blame you. I am des-pic-able,” said Lucy, triumphing over the syllables while tears rolled down her cheeks. “I have made a, oh, what is it, a spectacle of myself. I am drunk. All I ask, and I don’t think it’s much asking, is a cigarette. Or would that be too much for Justin Howard? I don’t like your name, by the way.”

  She was fast progressing from self-abasement to abuse. Justin gave her a cigarette and lit it, weighing what to do next. If he made her coffee, would it alert her just enough to wander around after he had left instead of going to bed, conceivably setting the apartment on fire? Even if she had sleeping pills they shouldn’t be taken on top of liquor in spite of an emptied stomach.

  On the other hand, he couldn’t stay here all night. He went into the kitchen, investigated the refrigerator, and said robustly, “How about a beer?”

  Beer was nourishment of a sort and, at this stage of the game, a soporific. Lucy turned in her chair and craned at him, a long suspicious stare. “Are you going to have one?”

  “Yes,” lied Justin. He opened a cabinet, took down a tall glass so that the beer should appear more enticing, poured, and carried it into the living room. “Here you are.”

  Lucy studied the glass profoundly, bringing it up to eye level as though inspecting for minnows, and gave a strange contemptuous little smile. Justin thought for a second that she was going to empty it onto the rug; instead, she drank thirstily, set the glass down with great care, and looked at one of his hands and then the other. “I don’t see yours.”

  “I’ll go get it.”

  The mere notion of nourishment had set off gnawing hunger pains in Justin’s long-neglected stomach. lie returned to the refrigerator and glanced ravenously in. His hostess was extraordinarily slender, and small wonder: Here in the nondrinkable line were capers, horseradish, a solitary egg, a head of lettuce, a poisonous-looking yellow mixture in a dish, and an eggplant.

  He thought wistfully of the salad over which his fork had hovered so briefly; he reflected even more poignantly that Amanda, a cheese-fancier, would have Port du Salut or Camembert or both. He closed the refrigerator door and looked in despair for crackers. There were none—but here, folded tightly and thriftily in its wrapper on one corner of the counter, was a heel of whole-wheat bread. Justin undid it with speed. She must have been saving it for some irritating bird; it was richly starred through with blue mold.

  “Justin?” Very small voice; Lucy had veered again. “I’m sorry I said I didn’t like your name. It was insec—inesk—I shouldn’t have said it.”

  “That’s all right, I didn’t pick it out,” Justin assured her, and, because something had to go into the abyss, took a can of beer from the refrigerator.

  And thought uneasily a few minutes later, sauce for the gander. Lucy had at least gotten rid of her punch (although perhaps, all things considered, it might be regarded as a potion) but he had not, and now it stirred lazily. He did not want to start his companion off on any lively discussion but could think of nothing calm and drowsy to say, with the result that Lucy stared bemusedly at him and he divided benign smiles between her and the rug while the silence settled over them like aspic. It occurred to him with an involuntary twitch of the mouth corners that it was too bad they had no materials for whittling.

  Fortunately, the trancelike situation didn’t last. Lucy suddenly snapped her eyelids wide, tossed her fair head, said with clarity and briskness, “I’m going to bed,” and got to her feet, betrayed only by a sharp and immediate collision with the lamp table. She seemed to be headed for the couch. Justin, leaping up, steered her firmly into the bedroom, where she subsided obediently; took off her shoes, pulled the coverlet over her. Five minutes later, when her even breathing took no notice of his light pat on her shoulder, he closed the door of the darkened apartment behind him and went out to his car.

  The snowfall was beginning to diminish; here, at any rate. To Justin, born and brought up in Connecticut, New Mexico weather seemed astonishingly localized: What was a mild rain in one spot might be rushing in the gutters three blocks away. There was an arroyo to cross on the way to Mrs. Balsam’s, and although the gauge showed enough gas to get him there and back in spite of his unplanned detour past Amanda’s house, it made no allowance for rocking and revving in the event of getting stuck.

  Perhaps because of his sustained lack of food, or that somnolent little period of waiting for Lucy to go safely to sleep, his sense of immediacy was los
ing its edge. Besides, another explanation had presented itself. This would be Mrs. Balsam’s first Christmas as a widow. What more likely than, to divert her mind from the fact, she had persuaded Amanda to go away with her over the holiday? She liked Santa Fe, and had a number of friends there.

  This hypothesis did not take into account Mrs. Lopez’s wild harangue on the telephone, but anybody who could plant fifty King Alfred daffodils upside down (according to Amanda) was not entirely to be trusted about plans or arrangements. Having paused in a coin-flipping way at the end of Lucy’s driveway, Justin wiped the misted windshield with his palm and turned toward home.

  Amanda, who had her tires checked regularly and had never driven on even one flat, wrestled grimly with the crippled car, the snow, her own nerves.

  As soon as she was out of the driveway, she had fished one-handedly through the glove compartment and found an ancient cigarette so drained of tobacco at one end that it flared like a torch when she lit it. It tasted like engine grime and dead perfume, and she put it out almost at once because this was a job that required both hands and all her attention.

  At a bare fifteen miles an hour, she might have been in command of an angry metal bull—or partial command, because the steering answered erratically while the framework bucked in its protestations. From the vibration, it seemed possible that something would break or fall off at any moment, or even that the car would pancake into the snow in a subsidence of nuts and bolts.

  It should not have mattered at such a time that she hated what she was doing to the car. She had respected and taken scrupulous care of it, and she flinched from this deliberate abuse, no matter how necessary, in much the same way that she flinched from women who dragged stumbling, crying children along pavements at a punishing adult pace.

  Was there still slashed rubber flapping around, or was she now proceeding on pure wheels? Impossible to tell in the snow; equally impossible to know where the shoulder lay. Amanda drove in the middle of the road, bright lights blazing into whiteness that was now whirling as the wind came up, trying to remember whether the arroyo came before or after the abruptly quenched glimmer of lights that had indicated a house.

  Because this clanking vehicle would never make it up a steepish slope.

  She didn’t have to worry about the arroyo. She hit something without warning, a rock or a pothole, and the wheel jerked sharply in her tense grip. She overcorrected, confused by the jolt and the spinning brilliance, and all at once the car was sharply canted, with two wheels in a ditch. Something—the rear axle?—had broken.

  In her despair, Amanda struck the edge of the steering wheel savagely with a clenched fist. Rosie, who had been a core of rigidity because even at two she sensed something odd about this noisy faltering progress, now began to draw deep quivering breaths as significant, to anyone who knew her, as a pitcher’s windup motion. Amanda said automatically, “Don’t, Rosie,” because the child’s inclination toward sobs was dangerously tempting. The engine had stalled. She started it again, felt the right front and rear wheels churn uselessly, switched off the ignition.

  What to do? She had alternately coaxed and forced the car almost a mile, because just ahead and on her right, not more than five yards back from the road, was the black shape of a small, long-deconsecrated church. Amanda had been in it once; it was narrow and low ceilinged, with space for only eight or ten short pews on either side of the center aisle. Its windows were broken, and elm seedlings had started up in places where the plank flooring had crumbled.

  Was there a very faint suggestion, below her and around a long curve, of car headlights?

  She had fortified herself earlier by the possibility of encountering another motorist to whom she could signal distress by using her flashers and her horn. Now she realized that a driver on this approach almost had to be on his way to Mrs. Balsam’s house.

  At this hour, on his way back to Mrs. Balsam’s house.

  The tinge of pallor vanished, but Amanda felt as if she had been warned and would not be warned again. Her car had turned into a trap; the church at least would not be a tight little corner. There was the matter of footprints, but the wind and snow should smooth them over quite soon. If the man in the raincoat came upon the abandoned car he might easily think—because that decoying female voice would certainly have reported that she would try to find someone to catch the palomino—that a friend had indeed arrived and rescued her and Rosie, the tire tracks buried by snow.

  It was fear and not logic which put forward the idea of a return at all. Logic said that that descent upon the house in spite of the failed bid to lure her out of it argued a plan which had to be implemented without delay; that the man who called himself Peter Dickens had delivered that faceless entity from the cellar somewhere and was busily piling up miles in a different direction.

  Fear had no rationalization, and needed none. Ridiculously, as if the exact location of footprints mattered, Amanda wriggled over the gear shift so that she could get out of the car on the passenger side. She plucked up Rosie in her blanket, locked that door too, and ran under a partly collapsed adobe archway, snow spilling into her shoes. The church door opened readily under her hand.

  Tiny by day, it was cavernous by match light. No altar remained, or stand for votive candles, although there were vestiges of tile which had been Stations of the Cross. There was a single tipped-over pew which, righted, would make a temporary bed for Rosie. From somewhere, in the smell of cold and decayed wood, came an inquisitive rustle. Nesting birds? Rats?

  Amanda’s current match went out and she lit another, instinctively, in this place, pinching them out and dropping them into her pocket. She said to the restively stirring Rosie, “We’ll sit down in a minute,” but she should not have spoken; her own voice, deadened and diminished in this forgotten air, frightened her.

  Up front and to the right there was a confessional. Amanda approached it, to investigate for purposes of concealment, and opened the nearest door. It seemed to take forever for Ellie Peale to come toppling stiffly out.

  Chapter 10

  By macabre chance, the dead face had assumed the exact angle of the photograph used to saturation point in newspapers and on the television screen, so that it took no buried foreknowledge to recognize this particular contour of white cheek, this feathery brown hair. The dark eyes were open but unfathomable: Ellie Peale had recorded no impression of the eternity into which she had been prematurely thrust. There wasn’t a great deal of blood on the front of the cream shirt. The knife must have—

  Amanda dropped the match away and backed away, trembling. In the midst of her horror and pity there was a frightful sense of intimacy, as though Ellie Peale, now serene, were charting the way for her. In the natural course of events her casual resting place would have been, for the winter months at least, as secret as any under grass; with its bell removed and its little tower fallen the church was not of the kind to attract wandering tourists—and how many peeked into confessionals in any case?

  Stuffed there, like an awkward parcel. “Bless me, Father, for I have been murdered.”

  Rosie had not shared in that flickering glimpse of death, because when she struggled higher in her blanketed perch on Amanda’s hip and suggested anxiously, “We go home?” it was only with a restless dislike of this strange dark place.

  “Yes, in a minute,” said Amanda, collecting herself with an enormous effort. They would have to get out of here, although home was an impossible sound that made her throat swell. It was not only unthinkable to stay, it could be mortally dangerous. Take boldly to the road in the remembered direction of house lights? Or, if the church had a side door, flounder across fields—provided that they weren’t fenced— even though it meant exposing Rosie to the cold for longer?

  Shock at that terrible thumping emergence from the confessional had rendered her dizzied, incapacitated, despairingly certain that whatever decision she made would be the wrong one. Her wet feet were icy, her cradling arm and shoulder ached even though R
osie, clinging to her with spindly arms and legs, supported most of her own weight.

  Amanda did not light another match, in case its brief glow might reach out and appear to make Ellie Peale twitch wistfully. Her sharp retreat had brought her halfway to the toppled pew. She proceeded cautiously, tipped it upright, and put the child down for a few moments of physical relief, flexing her arm and saying in a whisper, “Don’t move, Rosie, I’ll be right back.”

  The priest traditionally entered from the left, so that if there were a side door it would be there. Amanda touched the frigid wall and trailed her fingertips guidingly along it for perhaps five steps before she checked. A vehicle with a quiet engine, the kind which had purred away from Mrs. Balsam’s house, was nearing the church.

  Let it go by, she prayed wildly, but it did not. The soft steady hum came to a pause—while the snow was inspected for footprints?—and died. A car door slammed, with either a carrying echo or the almost-synchronized sound of a second one.

  Even if she had already located the side exit there wouldn’t be time to go back for Rosie and retrace her steps. Amanda caught a breath that missed being a sob by only a hair, found the pew again, got down with the child on the rough plank floor. The pew had legs at such intervals that it was impossible to slide under it. Rosie, startled and alarmed at this summary treatment, began a protest which Amanda cut off with a peremptory “Ssh!” She prepared herself to put a stifling palm over the small mouth if necessary, and the church door opened.

  There were obviously two of them, as silent and purposeful as commandos. They had a flashlight, a strong one, more stabbing white than yellow. Amanda, squeezing her eyes childishly shut, knew exactly w hen the brilliant probe struck the open door of the confessional and then the body of Ellie Peale. The two pairs of feet halted and then proceeded; there was an indistinguishable mutter—sickened, she imagined it to be something like, “You take her legs”—and then some fast bundling and bumping, culminating in a woody thud.