by Fritz Leiber
Finally he came to a place where the signs glared over low doorways, where their chief message was always “Girls and More Girls!” where dance music sobbed and moaned with dead passion, where only shabby and bleary-eyed automaton-men slouched through the dirty shadows. He passed State and Harrison twice without catching sight of Jane. The second time he parked the roadster in a noparking stretch of curb just short of the black veil of the railway yards and left it with the motor running, hoping it wouldn’t be hit. Then he started back, walking slowly.
He passed a tiny theater fronted by huge, grainy photographs of women in brassieres and pants painted bright orange. A sign screamed, “TWENTY NEW GIRLS!”
He passed a ragged old drunk sitting on the curb and muttering, “Kill ’em. That’s what I’d do. Kill ’em.”
He passed a slot-like store that said TATTOOING, then a jumbled window overhung by three dingy gilt balls.
He passed a woman. Her face was shadowed by an awning, but he could see the shoulder-length blonde hair, the glossy black dress tight over hips and thighs, and the long bare legs.
He passed a sign that read: IDENTIFICATION PHOTOS AT ALL HOURS. He passed a black-windowed bar that said: CONTINUOUS ENTERTAINMENT.
He stopped.
He turned around.
No, it couldn’t be, he thought. This one’s hair is blonde, and the hips swing commonly in the tight black dress.
But if you disregarded those two things . . .
Jane had shown him a blonde wig at the library.
She had written about making “preparations.”
The walk could be assumed.
Just then his glance flickered beyond the shoulder-brushing blonde hair.
A long black convertible drew up to the curb, parking the wrong way. Out of it stepped the handless man.
On the other side of the street, just opposite the girl in black, stood Hackman. She was wearing a green sports suit and hat. She glanced quickly both ways, then started across.
Halfway between Carr and the girl in black, Wilson stepped out of a dark doorway.
Carr felt his heart being squeezed. This was the finish, he thought, the kill. The final blow.
Unless . . .
The three pursuers closed in slowly, confidently. The girl in black didn’t turn or stop, but she seemed to slow down just a trifle.
. . . unless something happened to convince them that he and Jane were automatons like the rest.
The three figures continued to close in. Hackman was smiling.
Carr wet his lips and whistled twice, with an appreciative chromatic descent at the end of each blast.
The girl in black stopped. Carr slouched toward her swiftly.
The girl in black turned around. He saw Jane’s white face, framed by the ridiculous hair.
“Hello kid,” he called, saluting her with a wave of his fingers.
“Hello.” she replied. Her heavily lipsticked mouth smiled. She still swayed a little as she waited for him.
PASSING Wilson, Carr reached her a moment before the others did. He did not look at them, but he could sense them closing in behind, forming a dark semicircle.
“Doing anything tonight?” he asked Jane.
Her chin described a little movement, not quite a nod. She studied him up and down. “Maybe.”
“They’re faking!” Hackman’s whisper seemed to detach itself from her lips and glide toward his ear like an insect.
“I’m not so sure,” he heard Wilson whisper in reply. “Might be an ordinary pickup.”
Cold prickles rose on Carr’s scalp. But he remembered to ask Jane, “That ‘maybe’ you’re thinking of doing—how about us doing it together?”
She seemed to complete a calculation. “Sure,” she said, looking up at him with a suddenly unambiguous smile.
“Pickup!” Hackman’s whisper was scornful. “I never saw anything so amateurish. It’s like a highschool play.”
Carr slid his arm around Jane’s, took her hand. He turned and started back toward the roadster. The others moved back to let them through, but then he could hear their footsteps behind them, keeping pace.
“But it’s obviously the girl!” Hackman’s whisper was a trifle louder. “She’s just bleached her hair and is trying to pass for a street walker.”
As if she feared Carr might turn, Jane’s hand tightened spasmodically on his.
“You can’t be sure,” Wilson replied. “Lots of people look alike. We’ve been fooled before, and we’ve got to be careful with those others around. What do you say, Dris?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s the girl.”
Carr felt the whispers falling around them like the folds of a spiderweb. He said loudly to Jane, “You look swell, kid.”
“You don’t look so bad yourself,” she replied.
Carr shifted his arm around her waist, brushing her hips as he did. The maroon roadster still seemed miles away. Fringing his field of vision to either side were blurred bobbing segments of Wilson’s panama hat and pinstriped paunch and Hackman’s green gabardine skirt and nyloned legs.
“Pretty sure, Dris?” Wilson asked doubtfully. “Well, in that case—-”
Hackman leapt at the opportunity. “Let me test them,” she urged.
Through the skimpy dress Carr felt Jane shaking.
“Put that away!” Wilson whispered sharply.
“I won’t!” Hackman replied.
A BLEARY-EYED man in a faded blue shirt lurched up onto the curb and came weaving across the sidewalk. Carr steered Jane out of his way.
“Disgusting,” Jane said.
“I’d have taken a crack at him if he’d bumped you,” Carr boasted.
“Oh, he’s drunk,” Jane said.
“I’d have taken a crack at him anyway,” Carr asserted, but he was no longer looking at her. They had almost reached the roadster.
“Come on, kid,” Carr said suddenly, stepping ahead and pulling Jane after him. “Here’s where we start to travel fast.”
“Oh swell,” breathed Jane, her eyes going wide as she saw the chugging roadster.
“They’re getting away,” Hackman almost wailed. “You’ve got to let me test them.”
Carr swiftly reached for the door.
“It might be better . . .” came Dris’s voice.
Carr held the door for Jane. From the corner of his eye he saw Hackman’s hand. In it was one of the stiff, daggerlike pins from her hat.
“Well . . .” Wilson began. Then, in an altogether different voice, tense with agitation and surprise, “No! Look! Across the street, half a block behind us! Quick, you fools, we’ve got to get out of here.”
Carr ran around the roadster, jumped in, and pulled away from the curb. He started to give it the gun, but Jane touched his hand. “Not fast,” she warned. “We’re still playing a part.”
He risked a quick look back. Hackman, Wilson, and Dris were piling into the black convertible. On the other side of the street, drawn together into a peering knot, were the four men with black hats.
That was all he had time for. He swung the roadster slowly around the next corner, squeezing it by a high-walled truck that spilled trickles of coal dust.
They hadn’t gone a half block when they heard a souped-up motor roar past the intersection behind them without turning. Another half block and they heard another roar behind them that likewise passed on. They slumped with relief.
“Where’ll we go?” Carr asked. “There’s a lot to talk about, but I can’t stand much more of this driving.”
Jane said, “There’s one place they don’t know about, where we can hide out perfectly. The old Beddoes house. There are things I’ve never told you about it.”
Carr said, “Right. On the way I’ll tell you what happened to me.”
CHAPTER XVIII
Maybe some day the whole engine’ll wake. Maybe some day the meanness’ll be washed, or burned, out of us. And maybe not . . .
THE ORNATELY-carved nine-foot door was of golden oak gri
med with the years and it was bordered, Carr noticed, with a ridged blackness that once had been a rainbow frame of stained glass. It scuffed complainingly across humped-up rug, as the gate had across gravel. He followed Jane inside and pushed it shut behind them.
“I still don’t like leaving the roadster that way,” he said.
“We didn’t want it too near here,” she told him.
“But it’s such a big thing to have displaced in the pattern.”
She shrugged. “It was probably a display model, if I know my . . . friend. And I think the big machine has an automatic way of correcting large displacements like that. But look.”
The circle of her flashlight’s beam traveled over walls cobwebbed with soot, picked up here and there dull glints of a figured gold paper and huge pale rectangles where pictures had once hung. It jumped to two shapeless bulks of sheet-covered chairs, hesitated at a similarly shrouded chandelier looming overhead, finally came to rest on a curving stairway with a keg-thick newel post carved in the form of a stern angel with folded wings. Jane took Carr’s hand and led him toward it.
“What do you know about John Claire Beddoes?” she asked him.
“Just the usual stuff,” Carr replied. “Fabulously wealthy. Typical Victorian patriarch, but with vague hints of vice. Something about a mistress he somehow kept here in spite of his wife.”
Jane nodded. “That’s all I knew when I first came here.”
The musty odor with a hint of water-rot grew stronger. Even their cautious footsteps raised from the tattered but heavily padded stair carpet puffs of dust which mounted like ghostly heads into the flashlight’s beam.
“In spite of everything he did to us,” Carr said, “I almost hate leaving your friend like that.”
“He can’t go on betraying people for ever,” Jane said simply. “One of the reasons I brought you here is that he doesn’t know about this place.” They reached the second-story landing and a door that was a mere eight feet high. It opened quietly when Jane pushed it. “I’ve oiled things a bit,” she explained to Carr.
Inside the flashlight revealed a long dark-papered room with heavy black molding ornamented with a series of grooves that were long and very deeply cut, especially those in a picture rail that circled the room a foot from the ceiling. Round about were old-fashioned bureaus and chests and other furniture so ponderous that Carr felt it would take dynamite to budge them. While at the far end of the room and dominating it was a huge grim bed with dark posts almost as thick as the angel downstairs.
“Behold the unutterably respectable marital couch of the Beddoes,” Jane proclaimed with a hint of poetry and laughter. Then she entered one of the alcoves flanking the head of the bed, laid the flashlight on the floor, and fumbled at the wide baseboard until she’d found what she was looking for. Then, still crouching there, she turned to the mystified Carr a face that, half illuminated by the flashlight’s beam, was lively with mischief.
“To get the biggest kick out of this,” she said, “you must imagine John Beddoes waiting until his wife was snoring delicately and then quietly getting up in his long white nightgown and tasseled nightcap—remember he had a big black beard—and majestically striding over here barefooted and . . . doing just this.”
WITH THE words, Jane rose, not letting go of the baseboard. A section of the wall rose with her, making a dark rectangular doorway. She picked up the flashlight and waved Carr on with it.
“Enter the secret temple of delight,” she said.
Carr followed her through the dark doorway. She immediately turned around, lowered the secret panel behind them, arid switched off the flashlight.
“Stand still for a moment,” she said.
He heard her moving around beside him and fumbling with something. Then came the scratch of a match, a whiff of burning kerosene, and the next moment a gold-bellied, crystal-chimnied lamp at his elbow was shedding its warm light on scarlet walls and scarcely tarnished gilt woodwork.
“The place is so sealed up,” Jane explained, “that there’s hardly any dust, even after all these years. There’s some sort of ventilation system, but I’ve never figured it out.”
The room that Carr found himself looking at with wonder was furnished with lurid opulence. There were two gilt cupboards and a long side-board covered with silver dining ware, including silver casseroles with spirit lamps and crystal decanters with silver wine-tags hanging around their necks. Some of the silver was inset with gold. Toward the end of the room away from the secret panel was a fragile-looking tea-cart and an S-shaped love seat finished in gilt and scarlet plush. The whole room was quite narrow and rather less than half the length of the bedroom.
Jane took up the lamp and moved beyond the love seat. “You haven’t seen anything yet,” she assured Carr with a smile. Then kneeling by the far wall, she drew up a narrow section which disappeared smoothly behind the gilt molding overhead.
“They’re counterweighed,” she explained to Carr and then stepped through the opening she had revealed. “Don’t trip,” she called back. “It’s two steps up.”
He followed her into a second room that was also windowless and about the same shape as the first and that continued the same scheme of decoration, except that here the furnishings were a gilt wardrobe, a littered gilt vanity table with a huge mirror in a filagreed gilt frame suspended on scarlet ropes with golden tassels, and a bed with a golden canopy and a scarlet plush coverlet. Jane pulled off her blonde wig and tossed it there.
“And now,” she said, turning, “let me introduce you to the girl herself.” And she lifted the lamp so that it illumined a large oval portrait above the wardrobe. It showed the head and shoulders of a dark-haired and rather tragic-eyed girl who seemed hardly more than seventeen. She was wearing a filmy negligee.
“She looks rather pale,” Carr observed after a few moments.
“She should,” Jane said softly. “They say he kept her here for ten years, though that may have been an exaggeration.”
Carr walked on and looked through the archway in which the room ended. It led to a bathroom with gold, or gilded fixtures, including an ancient four-legged tub whose sides, fluted like a seashell, rose almost to shoulder height and were approached by little steps.
“Go on, look in,” Jane told Carr as he hesitated in front of it. “There’s no slim skeleton inside, I’m happy to report.”
Before returning, Carr noted that all the fixtures were, though old-fashioned, so shaped that the water would swirl in and out silently.
JANE WAS fumbling with a gilt molding that ran along the wall at eye level. Suddenly it swung out and down along its length and hung there on hinges, revealing a black slit in the wall that ran the length of the room and was about an inch wide.
“It opens into one of the grooves in the picture molding in the Beddoes bedroom,” Jane explained. “Our being two steps higher makes the difference. If there were a light in there and we turned out our light, we’d have a good view of the place. I suppose John Claire used it to make sure his wife was asleep before he returned. And his young friend could have used it to spy on her lover and his lawful mate, if she were so minded.”
Suddenly the cruel and barren possessiveness of the place and the terrible loneliness of the machinations of these long-dead puppets caught at Carr’s heart. He put his arm around Jane and swung her away from the black slit.
“We’ll never leave each other, never,” he whispered to her passionately.
“Never,” she breathed.
They looked at themselves curiously in the mirror they now faced. Their images peered back at them through a speckling of tarnish. With an uneasy laugh Carr went up to the vanity table and on an impulse pulled open the shallow center drawer.
There lay before him a small, single-barreled pistol, pearl-handled, gold chased. He picked it up and looked at the verdigreed rim of the lone cartridge.
“All the appurtenancies of a romantic fin de siecle lady of pleasure,” he observed lightly. “Apparently
never used it, though. I wonder if it was supposed to have been for herself or him, or the wife. The powder’s as dead as they are, I’ll bet.”
Jane came to his side and pointed out to him, amid the jumble of objects on the vanity, two blank-paged notebooks bound in red morocco and two heavy gold automatic pencils with thick leads. Most of the pages in each notebook had been torn out.
“I imagine they used those to talk together,” she commented. “He probably had a strict rule that she must never utter a single word or make a single sound.” She paused and added uncomfortably, “You’re bound to think of them as having been alive, aren’t you, even when you know they were just robots.”
Carr nodded. “No music . . . he murmured, fingering through the other objects on the vanity. “Here’s one way she passed the time, though.” And he pointed to some drawing paper and sticks of pastel chalk. A yellow one lay apart from the others. Jane flicked it back among the rest with a shudder.
“What’s the matter?” Carr asked. “Something my friend told me,” she said uncomfortably. “That Hackman and Wilson and Dris use yellow chalk to mark places they want to remember. Something like tramps’ signs. Their special mark is a cross with dots between the arms.”
CARR FELT himself begin to tremble. “Jane,” he said, putting his arm around her. “On one of the pillars of the gate in front of this place, above a ledge too high for you to see over, I saw such a mark.”
At that moment they heard a faint and muffled baying.
Jane whirled out of his arms, ran and lowered the panel between the rooms, came back and blew out the lamp. They stood clinging together in the darkness, their eyes near the long slit.
They heard a padding and a scratching and a panting that gradually grew louder. Then footsteps and muttered words. A snarl that was instantly cut off. Then a light began to bob through the bedroom doorway. It grew brighter, until they could see almost all of the bedroom through the crack with its tangled edging of dust and lint.
