Mr Splitfoot (Dr Basil Willing)

by Helen McCloy

  “Well do I remember it! That’s where Gisela and I went astray in the fog. It’s hard to realize that was only the night before last. I feel as if I’d been here a year.”

  “I’m sure you do. Summer people often ask in the village if there’s any other way they can get back to town, just so they don’t have to take that road again. Of course people up here who have learned to drive in the mountains think this is absolutely silly. They’re always laughing a little grimly about summer people who ‘go off the mountain’ when they drive and drink at the same time.”

  “I’ve noticed it’s always ‘the mountain,’ never ‘the mountains.’ ”

  “That’s the series of ridges you have to cross in order to get here, the bastion that protected them until the Thruway brought cars and buses. If you were fighting an old-fashioned battle here, without any air power, you could hold this whole region as long as you held that pass.”

  She drove on in silence until the lights of the village in the valley rolled into view. “Do you think we’ll ever know who killed David and Serena?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Do you?”

  “Don’t you?”

  She sighed. “No. I’d rather not know. It’s obvious now that it can’t have been an outsider. It has to be someone in our small circle.”

  “I should think that would be an additional reason for wanting to know.”

  “Oh, I understand what you mean. You think it’s unpleasant—perhaps even dangerous—knowing one of your intimates is a murderer, and not knowing which one. And it is. But isn’t it even worse to know if they are people you care about? All these people are strangers to you, of course, so you can’t possibly care about them or really understand how I feel.”

  “I admit that,” he answered her. “But surely you can’t think it safe to leave at large a person who has killed twice?”

  “You’re right, of course, but . . .” She sighed. “I expect the situation that led to David’s murder was an unique situation that would never arise again.”

  “And Serena’s murder?”

  “Arose out of David’s.”

  Did she know or suspect who the murderer was? Basil’s mind went back over what she had been saying. Did she really think his attitude unfeeling? Or was she merely invoking the twentieth-century convention that always allots more sympathy to the perpetrator of an outrage than its victim?

  It was quite fascinating to see how the convention ran through almost all contemporary literature. In a novel the trick was to start with one of those black and white situations where the old-fashioned reader would automatically identify with the victim. Say the torture murder of a child of three by a man of forty or fifty. The trick was then to show with the greatest psychological ingenuity and deployment of literary art that it was really all the fault of the three-year-old child who was exploiting or corrupting or teasing the poor forty-year-old man, that he was the one who should command the sympathy of all sophisicated readers, that what looks like white is usually black, and vice versa. It was the trademark of the era—inverted sentimentality as mechanical as the sentimentality from which it derived. It had nothing to do with life as most people lived it, and therefore nothing to do with art.

  When Basil tried to put some of this into words, Folly disagreed. “I know what you mean, but I don’t believe that what I feel now is inverted corn. It’s purely selfish. I don’t want to live through an experience that would be so unpleasant for me as finding out that someone I know and like and trust is capable of killing and must suffer for it.”

  “Purely selfish?”

  “Purely. I’m not thinking of the victim or the murderer now. I’m thinking of me. Perhaps the real victim of a murder is not the killer or the killed, but the innocent bystander who has to go on living and pick up the pieces when they’ve played out their little melodrama.”

  “That I will not dispute.”

  “Murderers should think before they murder.”

  “Murderers don’t think. If they did, they wouldn’t murder. Nothing is worth the risk they take.”

  She didn’t answer and he looked at her, wondering how much she knew or suspected of what was going on in his own mind at the moment. Her eyes were intent on the road. She couldn’t drive and return his gaze. He could take all the time he wanted to study the classic line of that Hellenic mask.

  Now they were beyond the village of Crowe’s Clove, rounding the hairpin bends that took them down one mountainside and up the next and on across a plateau to the crossroads where they picked up the road to Catskill.

  “You really needn’t wait for me,” said Basil as they drew near the garage. “I’m sure I can find my way back.”

  “I’d rather wait,” insisted Folly. “It would really be awkward if you got lost again tonight with Mrs. Willing wearing a cast.”

  They were coming to the outskirts of the little Hudson River town. Folly turned and turned again, picking her way easily through one-way streets that were familiar to her and not to Basil. As he saw how confusing the intricate web was after dark, he was glad that she had brought him and glad that she would be waiting for him to lead him back out of town.

  He saw his own car under a floodlight in the parking lot of the garage across the street from the hospital. Folly parked her car beside it while he went into the office to pay his bill.

  When he came out, she was standing beside her car. “I’ve got some traveling rugs in the back seat. Will you need them?”

  “No, Gisela will be warmly dressed.”

  She fell into step beside him. “You may need help with her if she’s unused to crutches.”

  Gisela was dressed and waiting in her room. She looked so well and cheerful that the heavy white cast thickening her right leg grotesquely didn’t seem to be a part of her at all and neither did the crutches beside her.

  “Why, Mrs. Swayne, how nice of you to come!”

  “It’s good to see you looking so much better. Can you manage those crutches?”

  “Oh, yes, but I wonder if I really need them.”

  “Better be on the safe side tonight. There’s ice on the surface of the snow and this is no time for a second fall.”

  Basil turned to Folly. “Why don’t you stay with her and help her downstairs while I bring my car around to the hospital entrance? Then we’ll wait in the car while you get yours.”

  Getting into the driving seat of his own car again made him feel as if he were being welcomed by an old friend after a long absence. He made a U-turn and parked in front of the hospital. Before he could get out of the car, Gisela was coming down the steps. She was using only one crutch. Folly held her other arm and carried the second crutch for her.

  Slowly, gingerly, they negotiated the icy steps and pavement. Basil got out of the car and opened the door. A nurse followed Gisela with her suitcase. Gisela eased herself into the seat beside the driver’s without aid, then swung both legs around so she faced the windshield.

  “Neatly done.” Basil smiled. “Now you’re safe in the car, I shan’t worry about you any more.”

  The nurse stowed the suitcase and crutches in the back of the car.

  Folly said: “My car’s still across the street in the parking lot. If you’ll wait here, I’ll drive around and get in front of you.”

  Basil went to the other side of his car. As he got in beside Gisela, he touched her cheek lightly with the back of his hand.

  “We’re not going to Crow’s Flight. We’re going to the ski lodge.”

  “Good.”

  He watched Folly cross the street and unlock her own car. Interior lights came on as she opened the door and climbed inside and went out a moment later as she closed the door. Seconds passed before her headlights came on. Now she was pulling out into the street, sounding her horn.

  At the signal Basil swung his car into the street behind Folly’s.

  She was going faster than he liked and he found he had to concentrate to keep up with her. Following another car,
even by daylight and in good weather, can be a tricky business. After dark, on icy roads, it wasn’t going to be easy. Yet it was better than attempting to find his way alone through the network of secondary roads, some marked obscurely and some not at all.

  He had tried to memorize the way as they came into town, but he hadn’t succeeded for, after the first three turns, there were no landmarks he recognized.

  As they reached the county road, another car passed him and slipped in between his car and Folly’s. One of those eager tailgaters who cannot bear to see a few inches between two cars ahead of them. Luckily this one peeled off at the crossroads. Basil accelerated, moving closer to Folly’s bumper. He wasn’t really afraid of losing her. She would be watching him in her rear-view mirror and she would pull over to the side of the road and wait for him if he lost her, but it would be much easier for both of them if she didn’t have to do that.

  They had been climbing steadily. Now they came to the gate to the real mountains at Palenville. They swung around curve after curve without meeting another car. He slacked his pace a little. There were No Passing signs on this corkscrew shelf carved out of the mountainside, so he could afford to keep a safer distance.

  They reached the summit of the first mountain and began to descend on the other side to the narrow clove where there was a waterfall in summer. At the very bottom, narrowly imprisoned between two great natural walls, they turned sharply and began to climb once more. The turn-off came sooner than he expected, and everything looked unfamiliar from then on. Evidently Folly’s short cut was going to bypass Haines Falls as well as Crowe’s Clove and take them to the ski lodge by back roads.

  He wondered a little: was she sure these back roads were plowed? She must be sure or she wouldn’t have risked taking him this way.

  It didn’t occur to him then to wonder why she was taking him by a route other than the one they had used coming down, which would also have led them to the ski lodge. Afterward he was going to marvel at this, but at the time he didn’t even think of it. Possibly because he was too busy straining to concentrate on those red taillights ahead of him that seemed to flip around each corner just a little too fast for comfortable following. If he did lose her and take a wrong turn here, he would be really lost. Even if she stopped and waited or tried to retrace her way and find him, she might not be able to if he had gone far or taken more than one wrong turn. He didn’t want that to happen. The sooner Gisela was safe and snug in a warm bed of her own, the better.

  At the very thought of losing Folly, he quickened speed again and closed in on the taillights of the white Rover, but it seemed to quicken, too, and that was a little odd. Was Folly determined to keep a fixed distance between them at all times?

  He tapped his horn, but still the other car didn’t slacken its pace. Should he pull up beside her as if he were going to pass her and call out, asking her to go a little more slowly? He would better warn her. He tapped his horn again as a signal and set his left blinker to flashing, then pulled over to the left and started to accelerate. To his surprise her left blinker started flashing too, as if she were going to make a left turn, so he was forced to fall back again behind her.

  “What is she trying to do?” said Gisela.

  “Apparently she’s going to make a left turn.”

  “Is there a left turn here?”

  “I don’t know. I’m completely lost now.”

  There was a turn. The Rover took it fast, skidded, slowed, accelerated and went on. This road was narrower than the others. Impossible for one car to pass another here.

  “Have we been on this road before?” asked Gisela in a small voice.

  “No, Folly’s showing us a short cut.” Basil’s own voice was colorless. “This seems like a private road, hardly plowed at all. Without these new snow tires, I couldn’t make it. . . .”

  “A very badly kept private road,” said Gisela as they lurched over a bump.

  There were sharp curves here, too. The Rover’s taillights flicked around another curve. As Basil followed it, Gisela gasped.

  He took his eyes off the road for an instant to follow her gaze. Involuntarily he slowed.

  The ruins of an old stone house that must have burned stood on their left. They were very high and the drop below them was very close. Far, far below, a carpet of lights shimmered on a vast plain. Far, far above, the milky way was an arch of jewels.

  “I’ve heard about this place,” said Gisela. “You have a view of five states.”

  “But why did Folly bring us around this way? Surely not for the view?”

  “You’ll lose her if you don’t hurry.”

  “I’ll lose whoever is driving that car.”

  “Then it’s not Folly?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder . . .”

  He took the next blind curve slowly. His caution saved his life. The Rover had stopped. It was parked across the road, broadside to his car, like a roadblock. At the speed he had been driving before, he must have smashed into it. As it was, he had to leave the road and plow through snow to avoid a collision. Luckily this side of the mountain was not too exposed to the wind for the snow to be deep. It was in the hollows and valleys that the drifts piled up. Here it was possible to maneuver.

  He swerved, giving the other car a wide berth, and started bearing back toward the road, but, as he did so, the other car moved toward him.

  At his back there was only the sheer drop and the vision of infinity. Coming toward him, gathering speed, the headlights of the Rover threw their dazzle in his eyes, masking the face of the driver and everything else inside the other car.

  He swerved into a wider curve, still bearing toward the road. The Rover swerved, too, following his car as a compass needle follows a magnet. There was no mistake now. It was the purpose of the other driver to force Basil’s car over the edge, even at the risk of both cars going over.

  If Basil swerved again, the Rover would swerve again and each swerve would bring both nearer to the edge. What a mad fantasy, to fight a duel with cars. Yet, wherever there is murder, there must always be madness . . .

  Basil swerved a third time. As the Rover followed, a door opened in its side and something fell out and rolled. A dead body?

  Basil couldn’t risk swerving any nearer to the edge. There was only one thing to do.

  He pulled his steering wheel around until his headlights were focused on the Rover’s in a direct confrontation and then stamped on the gas pedal. His car leapt forward like a horse at a touch of the whip. If only he didn’t strike a patch of ice and slip . . . If only the other driver would lose his nerve . . .

  He did. The sight of another car coming directly at you at full speed will unnerve even a desperate driver. It was the Rover that slowed a little now, for the first time, starting to swerve out and away from the oncoming car. It was the Rover that struck a patch of ice.

  It skidded wide with an hysteric squeal of tortured rubber, turned over and burst into flames. It was still flaming as it rolled over and over and dropped into the abyss.

  “Oh . . .” Gisela put her hands over her eyes and buried her face against Basil’s shoulder. Where only a moment before there had been so much noise, there was now a long silence.

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE SKI LODGE WAS something entirely new for the mountain region—the science-fiction school of architecture and decoration. Life was one visual shock after another, rather like Dr. Caligari, or some other futuristic film of the twenties, where the trick is to see everything from an unnatural camera angle.

  The ceiling of the main room towered to seventy feet. The large windows, kidney-shaped or triangular or rhomboid, were set in unexpected places, at floor or ceiling level rather than eye level, so you couldn’t see out. Other windows were bent around a corner to take in parts of two walls like the windshields of some modern cars.

  No chairs. Cushions on the floor, Japanese style, and as Western legs weary quickly in such positions, there was a large, sunken place for legs
and feet in the middle of the floor described as a “conversation well.” The fireplace was a stove, detached from the wall and sitting in the middle of the room. An old-fashioned stovepipe ran up to the ceiling, suggesting fires in the centers of wigwams and other primordial dwellings that had released smoke through a hole in the roof before the invention of chimneys.

  Inevitable as the detached fireplace was the tall tree, a hemlock this time, that stood with its roots in a patch of earth revealed by a hole in the floor and its upper branches passing through another hole in the roof. At one end of the room, a glass wall enclosed an aquarium filled with tropical fish which occasionally displayed cannibalistic and erotic tastes. TV sets, heated swimming pools and sauna baths were scattered at random about this ground floor. Also various bars for cocktails, milk drinks, coffee and tea.

  Lights were concealed and their color changed frequently. They were not really bright enough for such wide-open spaces. After dark the huge room seemed twilit. The effect was dreamlike as masses of people with vacant eyes sat sucking their drinks or trudging about aimlessly, like people in a great airport waiting for a plane that never came.

  Here there was none of the cozy, alcoholic gaiety of a small ski resort. The management proudly informed you that as many as five thousand people passed through here on one weekend. “Passed through” was the right phrase. You had a feeling that they were all on the way to somewhere else. There was no society here, only little, anonymous groups, who came together, stuck together and looked at other such groups with indifferent eyes, knowing they would never meet again. On the old ocean liners friendships had been formed among strangers. That couldn’t happen here, any more than it could on a transatlantic plane. The place was too large, the people were too many and their stay was too brief.

  To Basil the place was as impersonal as a subway car or an automat, an intimidating preview of the anonymous world of the future. Kept on the move by world-wide military or industrial duties, the descendants of “wandering food gatherers” would become wandering money gatherers. There would be no inherited homes, no family traditions, no sense of a personal link with history. No one would stay long enough in one place to establish the sense of living in a neighborhood. Everyone would be “passing through” and there would be no neighbors or friends or clubs, no civic spirit or social circles. Nothing between the minuscule individual with his parasitic dependents and the nation-state, so huge that his mind could hardly grasp its structure or function.