The Menace Within

by Ursula Curtiss

  The match flame shook, but that might have been attributed to a window not quite closed. The couple from the bar crossed the street in front of them, heads turning automatically, providing a measure of insulation in an electric moment. Amanda drew in smoke, flicked on her turn signal, and put the car gently in motion as the light changed. She didn’t really want the cigarette—indeed, it was making her heart beat very fast—but it had been for her an essential gesture, a brief handhold in this precipitous night, and she took another unhurried inhalation, when she had rounded the corner, before she tossed it out into the snow.

  The man beside her was silent and unstirring. Had that earlier command been simply an exercise of power, to underline her subservient status?

  The pickup now began to close the distance; in his ruffling through her handbag Dickens had obviously acquainted himself with her address. The last mile was almost totally dark, with luminarias extinguished until tomorrow night, although here and there a single window glowed and, three houses from Amanda’s, a recessed porch was dressed up in strings of mortuary blue. With a sense of time running out, she pulled into her driveway.

  But although her headlights had reflected off black windows and the immediate neighborhood was clearly fast asleep, they were taking no chances. Instead of following her in, the pickup coasted to a stop at the mouth of the drive, ready to take off like a flash at any indication of a trap. Her abortive attempt to reach Justin, Amanda supposed; for all they knew, the “Motley” lettered in black on the mailbox might be her father or her brother.

  She opened the door on her side before she could be ordered to and was dipping automatically into her bag when her passenger dangled her house keys between thumb and forefinger and then reached awkwardly across himself to manage his own door release. In view of what they had done and were doing, this casual appropriation of her property had a gnatlike insignificance; still, Amanda was stiff with anger as she marched ahead of him through the snow, scarcely feeling the pain in her ankle, and waited for admission to her house.

  Had they thought there was a possibility that she would throw Rosie to the winds, manage to get into the house first, lock the door and call the police?

  For that matter—this man would certainly want to make sure that the house was untenanted, and her telephone, on a corner table in the living room, had a soundless touch dial—was there a chance . . . ?

  He gave her the keys to spare himself any lefthanded fumbling, shouldered past her with a sudden fierce grip on her wrist, stood warily testing the warm dark silence before he swept the inner wall with his palm and encountered the light switch.

  Amanda blinked at her little hall, as strange to her as if she had been away for a week. Its cream wallpaper had pencil stripes of grape and slate, the coatrack was occupied only by a raincoat and a blue-and-green Irish wool scarf, the carved chest held the morning’s mail which she had dropped there unopened to answer her telephone and learn about Mrs. Balsam.

  The living room to the left, light catching a quiver of silver from the Christmas tree in its depths, was the short end of the L which held kitchen, dining room which was scarcely more than a windowed alcove, tiny guest room, bedroom, and bath. The absolute stillness everywhere seemed to Amanda as proclamatory as a blank sheet of paper, but if she had even eight or nine seconds alone . . .

  She tried, saying in a voice which invited echoes, “There’s no one else here, I live by myself.”

  This drew a glance of near-contempt from the tense man at her side. In the unspeaking way which was beginning to get badly on her nerves—had he been like this with Ellie Peale?—he snapped the outside light on and off, signalingly. No wonder neither of the witnesses had been able to identify him as Anglo or Spanish, thought Amanda over tightened nerves; his opaque features and the length of his eyes looked, if anything, faintly Indian. Not American Indian, but the kind who ate missionaries on steamy riverbanks.

  The pickup came quietly into the drive, and then Dickens walked in with Rosie.

  Even before he set her down so jarringly that her spindly bow legs went out from under her, it was clear that the child had sparked off his temper by wailing out of fright and what must be a sense of total abandonment: One side of her tear-streaked face was a furious red. Far more alarmingly, she sat on the floor with the inertness of a potted plant, past protest, past belief in promises that no one was going to hurt her.

  Amanda’s heart shook. People said reassuringly in times of crisis, “Children are tough,” and while they might be right most of the time, Rosie wasn’t tough. It seemed a fresh part of madness that she was here in this depleted state because the doctor had vetoed the plane trip east as too taxing.

  “Go get the stuff,” said Dickens peremptorily. His icy eyes dared Amanda to make any outcry about the child now hiccuping at his feet. With the new familiarity she hated, she was sure that he had remembered something, or heard something on the radio, to give him this dangerous concentration, and she only sent him a level look, picked up Rosie, a passive instead of a clinging weight, and started out of the hall.

  Her immediate captor was behind her at once; Dickens, she realized, had wheeled purposefully into the living room. In search of the telephone? And who would answer? Almost certainly, thought Amanda, the cool-voiced woman who had made the call about the palomino mare. This night’s work would have to be known only to a bare minimum of people.

  A wife, or what was quaintly called a housemate? Either would belong to Dickens; the voice had the same credibility as his, and Amanda would have been willing to bet that she was as attractive as he.

  Rosie quaked rhythmically against her shoulder, and this particular beleaguerment was almost more than she could bear: What if it were the onset of the kind of siege which could prostrate a longshoreman? She had read about exotic remedies like burnt feathers, but where did people get feathers?

  And those relentless feet following, as though she had acquired them as permanently as her shadow. Amanda had to resist what she knew would be a disastrous impulse to whirl on the man behind her. She snapped on the bathroom light and said to Rosie, “Try to hold your breath,” and took a very deep breath of her own to illustrate.

  Rosie, familiar with every place in the house, only gazed distractedly into the mirror over the sink. For a second, the reflection there was a terrible mockery of a family portrait: young woman holding child, man at her shoulder—with, in this brilliant examining light, something oddly smooth about his hairline. A wig.

  Amanda jerked the mirror open, destroying an intolerable illusion, stared along the cabinet shelves, and took down two small plastic bottles which she placed without comment on the edge of the basin. She got an angry dark stare. “Open them.”

  He couldn’t, at least without considerable pain. Amanda obeyed, because God knew what he might do if she said, “Open them yourself,” and set them down again and walked out of the bathroom. Behind her, water began to rush fiercely into the basin as if he planned to soak his hideous red hand.

  Suppose she simply kept on walking, as if in obedience to further orders? He might easily have sent her for something like Epsom salts—and she had Rosie, and in the kitchen there was the back door.

  And outside the back door there was the virgin snow. It was at least three hundred yards to the nearest house, black under its grove of cottonwoods when she had passed it earlier; how far would she get before Dickens realized that it was taking her a long time to find the medication and came plunging after her?

  In the kitchen, Amanda switched on the light, heartbeat accelerating as she gazed at her pink plaid eggcup soaking in the sink, an unreal reminder of the perfectly normal morning that seemed like several days ago. Was it conceivable that in his preoccupation with his hand the creature in the bathroom had left the Volkswagen keys in the ignition? She couldn’t remember taking them out, although there were things you did so automatically that they left no impression, and she had put her handbag down on the hall chest when she picked up Ros
ie.

  It was worth a try, even though the thought of failure and discovery terrified her. Rosie gave a listless hiccup and Amanda moved soundlessly across the kitchen, charting the distance around the house and the obstacles in the way—and Dickens was in the hall, was rounding the corner. She pivoted and had a cabinet open when he put his head around the door, saying sharply, “Let’s go.”

  Reaction had gotten to her hands, so that the glass she reached for rocked and sent another one toppling. “I’ve got to stop these hiccups first. She nearly died of them once,” lied Amanda, growingly afraid of this escorted trip out into the dark. Face under control, she turned to look unwaveringly at him. “It’s perfectly possible, you know.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” said Dickens explosively, but his regard was wary as well as disgusted. The child was his lever, the carrot Amanda would follow. He consulted his watch as she filled the glass and held it to Rosie’s lips—waiting for what? No one was going to drive up and rescue her, everybody in the world was asleep except her and Rosie and Dickens and Ellie Peale’s murderer.

  “She’s got two minutes,” he said.

  At St. Swithin’s Hospital, blond and curly-haired Mrs. Syce, having returned to the nurses’ station for coffee after helping with breathing therapy for a half-drugged and protesting postoperative patient, glanced up at the bank of lights and said, “Oh, no, not again.”

  “Not again what?” In view of the weather and the close approach of Christmas, this wing was surprisingly quiet, and Mrs. Peralta, on duty at the desk, was trying to decipher a letter from her son in South Korea: It appeared that he wrote in the dark, with a broken goose quill.

  “Six-twelve, the woman with the stroke. Someone told me she’s one of our volunteers, by the way. She can’t have any more sedation until three o’clock, but I can’t get her quieted down.”

  “. . . Oh. Mark says that the penalties for pot are very stiff, but in the village the bars sell a drink that’s actually embalming fluid,” reported Mrs. Peralta absorbedly.

  “The mysterious East,” said Mrs. Syce, and walked resignedly along the corridor to Mrs. Balsam’s room.

  Chapter 13

  In her nightmare, Mrs. Balsam had been sewn tightly into a black bag which kept getting into her mouth when she tried to scream. She woke, heart thudding, to the blessed feeling of air and space around her, and then the gradual realization that half of the nightmare was reality. She was voiceless.

  In spite of excellent eyesight—she wore glasses only for driving—she had always harbored a fear of going blind, but it had never occurred to her to worry about losing the faculty of speech. Now, to quiet her heart, she tried to concentrate on the more cheerful aspects of her situation, reminding herself that it might be only temporary, that she had complete faith in Dr. Simms and St. S within’s was a very good hospital, that sixty-seven was not antique.

  Such was the cling of the sleeping pill, along with her sense of deliverance from the muffling black bag, that she only rediscovered her paralyzed right side when she attempted to turn to a more comfortable position, and remembered all over again what had sent her here.

  The signal cord was clipped to the draw sheet where her left hand could find it automatically. Mrs. Balsam pulled it, and lay trembling in the half-dark.

  Her memory was blank in spots, like a roll of defective film on which some pictures had not come out. She knew that she had gotten out of her car, although she had no recollection of where she had been going or why she had started back to the house, and that in a mirror inside she had seen the sudden impossible reflection of a man’s face contorted in a grimace.

  It was a dark-stubbled face alien to Mrs. Balsam’s world, the kind that she imagined sprang out of hiding in the back of cars left unlocked or waited in shadowy apartment-building lobbies. Her doors were secure; she had not left the house since the morning of the day before; Apple had not uttered a single bark. So he had been concealed inside—a crawl space came to mind, because he had seemed to be rising up in the mirror— for at least that long, while she had thought herself alone.

  He hadn’t seen her. In shock and simple horror at all those unsuspecting hours, she had whirled and started back to her car, where Apple waited, intending to drive to the police station—and there the film went empty. She recalled a girl in a puzzling brown uniform, and then the hospital and the doctor, and finally Amanda.

  Who had said she would take care of the Afghan and the mare and bring some personal belongings to the hospital, and who must be warned if it was not already too late.

  Before she had been implacably sedated, Mrs. Balsam had tried to force “cellar’ out of her stony throat, from a conviction that the man had been nowhere in the house proper; mightn’t they attach significance to that, when she had been found outside? Now, straining again to unite brain and vocal cords (or was that a good idea? Would her treacherous body obey her only once, with no one to hear?) she produced only harsh exhalations and then, in a queer tone which she would not have recognized as her own, “shell.”

  Her tongue and lips were awkward and half frozen, but was it a slur or a subconscious prompting? She was of a different generation than her niece and remembered very well the commotion over bomb shelters: the single-minded pros, the moralistic cons. It seemed inexplicable that she could possess one without knowing it; on the other hand, her house was the right age, and such a place would be windowless, descended into from within. Where, in that particular area, she couldn’t imagine nor did she care; her mind could grapple only with the immediate issue of warning Amanda.

  It never entered her head to believe that the man had departed hours ago, any more than it would have to assume that a rattlesnake coiled beside a path was fast asleep. He was clearly not an ordinary thief, or robber or burglar or whatever the precise definition was, and if he had worn that furious grimace when he thought himself unobserved, how would he look if he were suddenly surprised by Amanda?

  The propped door opened wider, the light flooded on, a nurse who looked remarkably like Harpo Marx came in. Mrs. Balsam half remembered her from earlier blood-pressure and temperature checks. She flipped off the signal light, made an automatic inspection of the I.V. needle, said cheerfully, “Would you like a drink of water? No? Warm enough?”

  Mrs. Balsam gazed piercingly up at her. She had decided to try for “cellar” again, because “shelter” by itself did not mean much. She opened her mouth and instructed her throat, and nothing happened; she was as helpless as a year-old child handed a pencil and told to draw a capital B.

  Her muscles felt stretched to snapping point. She tried to will her eyes full of a plea to wait, but the nurse’s attention was now disapprovingly on the old-fashioned crank at the foot of the bed. “My goodness, I didn’t realize that we had so many of these relics left. Tomorrow we’ll get you into a bed with controls you can work yourself.”

  In a matter of moments, thinking that another human presence had been needed as reassurance, she would be gone. Mrs. Balsam put her lips together and uttered desperately, “Man. ”

  To her own ears it sounded exactly as she had meant it to, a complete and emphatic noun. The nurse glanced down at her with surprise and congratulation. “Your niece, you mean. I remember her name because I have a Siamese called Amanda. Oh, Dr. Simms is going to be very pleased with you.”

  As though this small triumph were what she had been summoned to hear, she began to move toward the door, mind already elsewhere as she said automatically, “All set now?”

  A new trail had been offered. Holding the round and lively eyes with her own, Mrs. Balsam got her good arm free of the covers and pointed awkwardly across herself in the direction of the telephone which, as standard hospital practice, was placed so as to be reached with ease only by healthy acrobats.

  Call Amanda, she begged intensely, and the nurse, following the gesture and recognizing its urgency, said soothingly, “Yes, your niece called to ask about you, hours ago, from your house.”


  She studied her patient’s expression. She said kindly, If you’re worried about all this snow, I wouldn’t. Most likely she heard the weather reports, and stayed there. Good night now.”

  She was gone and Mrs. Balsam was in the semi dark again, staring at the wedge of dimly lighted corridor and a situation she had never even contemplated.

  She had forgotten about the snow predicted for tonight. Was it possible that Amanda, wondering about road conditions in the morning, would sleep at the house so as to be at the source of supply when she was ready to leave for the hospital? In that case, what if the man came up out of hiding again, and Apple barked and Amanda got up to see why?

  Mrs. Balsam, instantly tense all through what she could feel of her body and aware that her heart was beating uncomfortably, made a conscious effort to breathe slowly and evenly. Establishing even that faulty communication with the nurse had taken its toll: Her throat muscles quivered spasmodically, her good arm felt leaden from its abortive attempt at a message, confusion was seeping into her head like mist.

  After a few minutes she flexed the fingers of her left hand experimentally. She was not as deft with it as many right-handed people, thanks to a wrist broken and badly set years ago, but still. . . Knowing the reaction it would bring, even though her volunteer work had never led her into these sober precincts, she put on her bed light again.

  This time there was almost no wait. The approaching tread had the crispness of beginning exasperation, and when the blonde nurse entered she snapped the signal light off like someone dispatching a persistent mosquito. “Yes?”

  In spite of this menacing promptitude, Mrs. Balsam had had time to decide that she would not even try for the police: What credence would they give to the tale of an elderly woman who had suffered a stroke? Besides, her one brush with officialdom had not been felicitous.

  Three years ago, in the Heights, she had glanced out a window just after dark to see a flashlight bobbing intermittently around the back of the house next door. The owners w ere in Europe, and had asked the Balsams to keep an eye on the place now and then. With her husband away, and after some debate with herself because it was barely possible that this was some checking-up relative, Mrs. Balsam had called the police.