The Iron Cobweb

by Ursula Curtiss

  Maire’s cry, coming from a cat’s throat.

  At Elizabeth’s side the child said absorbedly, “Those kitties in a rage. Mama?”

  “Yes. As a matter of fact,” said Elizabeth conversationally, “they’re ouns, aren’t they?”

  Maire’s gaze pivoted to hers. “Oim isn’t here.” It was half a statement, half a fearful question. The small hand reached confidently for Elizabeth’s. “Look, Mama . . .”

  She led Elizabeth into the living-room, stopping directly before the front windows; from her air of reassured triumph, she had been here moments ago. She said pleasedly, “See, there’s no oun,” and waited, her face turned up.

  And Elizabeth stood there, more baffled than she had been before. She was sure, because of its singular echo, that Maire had borrowed her cry from a tomcat’s howl. But she had showed no fear at the sight of the cats, so it was something else, some related memory. . . .

  At a little after three o’clock, she went up to the studio. She found herself slipping out surreptitiously, which was ridiculous, because although Oliver had advised her pointedly not to, she hadn’t promised one way or the other. Nevertheless, she chose a time when Constance was upstairs to say hurriedly, “I’ll be at the studio if you need me, Noreen,” and make a rapid exit.

  It was all wrong to feel this release in the little room on the top of the hill, but she did. When the light grew dull Elizabeth turned on the lamps, coming with a new freshness to her manuscript. The scene she’d ended on was all wrong. She hunted for cigarettes, found two aged ones in a package between the couch cushions and sat down at her typewriter to try another approach.

  It worked, or partly; in the middle of it she discovered with dismay that she had used her last match. But if she could finish the chapter, she would have what amounted to a third of a book. She tried to concentrate, keeping her eyes away from the remaining cigarette, telling herself firmly that smoking couldn’t be that necessary to her work.

  She found that it could.

  Regretfully, she gathered the scattered sheets from the couch, collected them in a neat and gratifyingly weighty pile and put them on top of her typewriter, slipped the cover over them and turned off the lamps. With luck, Constance wouldn’t even know she had left the house—it hadn’t been much more than an hour— and there would be no remonstrations from anybody.

  There was no sign of Constance when she returned; her cousin was apparently still upstairs. Noreen said that Lucy Brent had called. “She seemed surprised that you were out at all, Mrs. March. She asked if you’d call her when you came in.”

  But Lucy didn’t answer her phone, although Elizabeth let it ring for moments on end.

  That was at four-thirty.

  Darkness came, and a damp thrusting wind. Elizabeth forced herself upstairs to assemble clothes for the cleaner’s weekly call; she would not have admitted to anyone her sudden and enormous fatigue. The radio beside Oliver’s bed might help keep her awake; she turned out pockets, drowsily, and listened to a weather report that said there was snow and a cold wave on the way.

  She crossed the room, Oliver’s flannels over one arm, and sat down on the bed to turn off the radio.

  Snow and a cold wave . . .

  Better call the oil company . . .

  How odd about Maire . . .

  She fell asleep. She slept uneasily, half-conscious at moments of lamplight on her eyelids, too bound by lassitude to stir. She dreamed that someone walked up to her, someone close and trusted, but when the hand came out to greet hers it was not a hand at all under the cuff but an enormous paw with a bite of claws just under the fur. When she snatched her hand away—appalled, knowing —the familiar voice stopped chatting and ripped upward in a howl.

  Elizabeth awoke with a jerk of terror. She had pushed Oliver’s flannels violently away from her, but the scream still echoed on the air. . . .

  This time, it was Maire.

  “No,” said Elizabeth tensely to Noreen. “Let me . . .”

  She dropped down on her knees before the living-room windows so that her face was level with Maire’s. She put her arms around the rigid body, hoping that the pound of her own heart would not communicate itself. “Show me where it is, darling, show me, and we’ll make it go away—”

  Maire went tighter. She said in a muffled whisper, “Oun,” and plunged her face into Elizabeth’s throat, and Elizabeth, watching the darkness, turned all at once to ice.

  There was a pair of eyes, looking in, watching. Yellowy and shining, like a monstrous cat’s, just above the ragged black tops of the clipped-down cedars under the windows. Elizabeth knelt there, frozen, her breath and her heartbeats afraid to move her own eyes from that blind and glittering stare.

  It vanished suddenly. It was there, and then it was not. Elizabeth only half heard Noreen’s shaken release of breath behind her. She was watching incredulously as outside on the lawn a hand came up in salute, the blackness shifted, the porch light flickered on Steven Brent’s face.

  He hadn’t been in the cedars—that was her changed perspective. He had halted on the path, probably struck by the tableau visible through the living-room windows, and the light had reflected on his glasses. . . .

  Elizabeth rose, and gave Maire’s shoulders a reassuring pat; her legs felt weak. She smiled at Noreen in relief—did her own face look as bleached, as sucked-dry with fear?—and said, “It’s Mr. Brent.” It seemed a long moment before the girl managed an answering smile and a murmur as she took Maire’s hand. Then Elizabeth went to open the door.

  “ ‘Oun?’ . . . Oh, of course, the night we were here and Maire —Good Lord.” Steven was concerned and apologetic, amused only when he found, five minutes later, that Maire would still come willingly to his knee. “What’s it all about?”

  Elizabeth told him about the snarling cats on the lawn that afternoon, and her own translation of it. The sound, probably heard by Maire for the first time at night; one of the cats jumping up on a windowsill to glare into the lighted room—“Something like that, anyway,” said Elizabeth, and drew an enormous sighing breath, realizing the full measure of her relief.

  Steven was watching her thoughtfully. He said, ignoring Maire’s cordial invitation to exhibit his stomach, “You know, I think this has done you more good than all the medicine and rest in the world. Take a look in the mirror—you’re a changed woman.”

  He stood up. “As a matter of fact, that’s what I dropped by for —to see if you were well enough to start thinking about when we can expect the finished book.”

  He talked about dates and publishing schedules, and Elizabeth, naming a month that would give her leeway, went with him to the door. “Tell Lucy that I called her when she was out, will you, and that I’ll probably see her tomorrow.”

  “I will. Meanwhile, I hope I’ve shaken off Maire’s oun for good.” He was smiling, but his eyes were intent. “Let me know if there’s anything else, won’t you, Elizabeth?”

  She should have been surprised at the message behind that, but she wasn’t. She had realized for some time that, of them all, Steven had caught an echo of the terror she lived with, without being aware of its cause. Her own instinctive ease with him had told her that. She said, matching his own lightness and the meaning behind it, “I might take you up on that some time.”

  “Good, do,” said Steven, and was gone.

  Elizabeth felt lighter than she had in weeks; it was as if Maire’s monster, in crashing down, had revealed a doorway to safety and reason. She had been convinced that the oun was a synonym for evil, she had started up in panic at a child’s aberration. That night on the stairs Maire had caught a glint from Lucy’s lorgnette, or Constance’s shell-rimmed glasses, or Steven’s, and that was all there was to that.

  In the kitchen, Maire’s voice lifted in a peal of rage: “He ate it, he ATE it!” and there was a scuffle and a wail from Jeep. Elizabeth went in to find Noreen restoring order. Jeep wore a sated look in spite of his tears; he had managed to cram down most of two s
uppers while Noreen was stirring cocoa and Maire was in the living-room. Elizabeth gave Maire a slice of bread and jelly and Jeep a glance of straight-faced censure; it was difficult to restrain her own buoyancy.

  The gilt clock said a few minutes after six, and she thought in a way she hadn’t thought in weeks: Oliver’s late. She would get out the ice for cocktails, and the anchovies and the imported crackers—it was, in a way obscure to everyone but herself, a night to celebrate. When Constance came in at the back door, returning from her usual before-dinner stroll, Elizabeth said at random, “Let’s go out tonight, shall we? Have a drink here, and then find a place with no home cooking? We haven’t been anywhere in so long.”

  Constance gave her a startled glance. “You oughtn’t to go out— she began doubtfully.

  “But I feel wonderful. In fact, I—”

  Elizabeth broke off short, her hands motionless on the ice tray. Behind her in the pantry, Constance said, “I still don’t think . . .” and then urgently, at the quality of the silence, “Elizabeth! What is it?”

  Elizabeth didn’t answer. She stood without moving, head tilted a little, staring through the window at darkness that should have been absolute—and wasn’t. She went on staring, until a hopeless trembling began and she stopped it fiercely, brushing past Constance, running blindly for the telephone.

  Sixteen

  SHE HAD THOUGHT in surprise, when she first saw the flaw of gold against the darkness of hill and sky, I left a light on in the studio after all.

  And then she thought, But lamplight wouldn’t—rush and ebb like that. It looks like . . . flames, it looks almost as if—

  The studio’s on fire.

  It was like the plunge after a slow, icy, unwilling wade. Elizabeth lost a moment in sheer disbelief. Then she was on the telephone and giving the address to an alert voice at the wire, running into the darkness to watch the distant yellow leaping, not heeding Constance’s wail: “Elizabeth! You mustn’t, not without your coat, you’ll catch pneumonia and there’s nothing you can . . . oh, Oliver, thank God you’re here.”

  Oliver was a warm hard shape in the windy cold, holding her shoulders briefly, saying against her temple, “Thank God you’re all right. When I heard the sirens heading this way—” The engines, arriving, blotted out his voice. A spotlight struck through the dark, there was a sudden noisy tangle of running men and fire hose.

  “Put this on.” Oliver was holding her coat; Elizabeth felt numbly for the sleeves. “And stay here, I’ll be right back.”

  Elizabeth stayed, and watched the flicker on the hill as it slowed and dimmed. Her mind kept playing back her own cheerful voice, saying to Steven Brent not even an hour ago, “Well, let’s see—I’ve roughly a third. Say about the end of March . . .”

  But the weeks of work were all wiped out now, unless by some miracle the flames hadn’t reached her typewriter. And the studio itself, the place of refuge, the only place in the world now where she was whole and intact. . . . Elizabeth dug her hands fiercely into her pockets and went on watching.

  Beside her, although she hadn’t heard her cousin come out of the house, Constance hesitantly, “I can hardly believe it, Elizabeth, it’s frightful. How do you suppose it started?”

  “I don’t know.” Elizabeth had been too stunned to think about that yet; she turned her head and looked wonderingly up at the hilltop.

  “They seem to have it under control,” Constance said after a pause. “That’s a mercy, anyway. You keep a carbon of your manuscript, don’t you, Elizabeth?”

  “No,” said Elizabeth between her teeth. “Like a fool, I do not.” The hose was being wound back down the hillside now The second engine departed with a roar. Elizabeth said, lifting her voice over it, “I’m going up to find Oliver, and see if they know . . .”

  Oliver was standing just outside the studio, talking to one of the firemen. There were two others just inside the doorway, playing their flashlights over the soaked huddle of furniture inside. Elizabeth caught a glimpse of bare windows and blackened woodwork, couch cushions flung soddenly into a corner, the couch itself with a gaping hole in its center.

  The fireman, acknowledging introductions, said, “Too bad, ma’am. Nice little place here,” and turned back to Oliver, apparently answering an earlier question. “Looks like it started from a cigarette between the couch cushions. You can see for yourself,” he swept an arm back, “how the worst of the damage is right around that area. It might have smouldered out by itself, but with that pile of papers to catch on to . . .” He shrugged and, calling to the other men, departed.

  With the lights and the voices gone, the studio was a forlorn, bitter-smelling little shell under the leafless trees. Oliver said, fumbling for the right tone, “Well, that’s that. I’m afraid there’s no doubt what the pile of papers was. Of all the lousy, villainous luck . . .”

  Elizabeth shook off the light circle of his arm; with it went her own dazed, unquestioning acceptance. She ran into the studio, sure of her way among the damp acrid shadows, hearing Oliver call something about coming back later with a flashlight.

  She didn’t need lights, only her hands, carrying their own physical memory. And the cover of her typewriter, warm under her fingers but untouched by the fire and still fitted securely over the machine itself, told her everything she needed to know.

  She was back at the house again, and the warmth and the cruelly mocking surface of safety, as though it were one of a million contented homes, and not—and not . . .

  “You’re cold,” Oliver said, watching her. “Come over to the fire and finish that drink before we even think about this . . . My God, what next?”

  Cold, Elizabeth thought, lifting her glass docilely to her lips, not tasting what they touched; yes, but not a cold that bourbon or flaming driftwood could touch. She had just witnessed the beginning of violence. She had known it would come, because hatred was a thing that must be fed, but she had never faced it in such concrete terms as an approach after darkness, a match held to carefully-placed paper, a silent withdrawal—to watch? Or merely to listen in triumph to the fire signal, the sirens?

  Her outpost, the studio, was gone. Oliver had said, “What next?”— but how could you build barricades against a thing as sly and seeking as a mist, that permeated your very day-to-day existence under the name of deference, or loyalty, or love?

  Noreen Delaney had been lingering uncertainly in the doorway while Oliver gave Constance a terse account of what the fireman had said. Now she took a decisive step forward, her young face worried. “Mrs. March, you’re not well—you’re shivering. Hadn’t you better let me—”

  Oliver turned sharply, Constance half-rose in concern. Elizabeth said steadily, stopping them all, “No. I’m perfectly all right, thanks, except that I’d like to say this. I’ve no way of proving it at the moment, but the studio was set on fire deliberately, after I left it this afternoon. It couldn’t have happened otherwise.”

  In spite of her tight cool voice, it sounded preposterous, a defensive child’s tale of masked men with guns who had broken their heirloom vase. Noreen lifted a startled hand to her cheek. Oliver, leaning against the mantel to light a cigarette, let the small flame die out between his fingers. Constance sat forward in her chair.

  peering over the rims of her glasses with a surprised and faintly affronted expression. Can she possibly, wondered Elizabeth wildly, be going to write a letter to the laundry about this?

  The flicker of reaction lasted for perhaps five ticks of the gilt clock. Then Oliver struck another match and said in a conversational tone, “It’s one of those things. Firemen are often guessing, have to be. The heater—”

  “It wasn’t on.”

  Elizabeth began to explain about finding herself in the studio with only two cigarettes, using her last match, searching without success for more. Unspoken, but louder in the room than her own desperately calm voice, were the things that all of them knew and none of them said: that Elizabeth without adequate cigarettes and match
es was as unimaginable as a wingless bird, that when she was at her desk she would often, in her concentration, light a fresh cigarette while a forgotten one burned at a perilous tilt in her ashtray.

  She looked at their faces. She said, “It isn’t only that. I left my manuscript on top of the typewriter and put the cover over the whole business. It isn’t there—it’s what the firemen found the remains of, on the couch. It didn’t get there by itself, unless,” said Elizabeth, suddenly tired and bitter, “the characters are more life-like than I thought.”

  Constance breathed through her nose, a sign of distress and perplexity. Oliver propped an elbow on the mantel and looked into his glass. He said, “But are you certain—” and abandoned that as leading straight to trouble. “We’ll go up in the morning and make sure. There’s always the chance . . .”

  Elizabeth met his eyes, or tried to; Oliver’s flickered away. She said, “I’ll go and do something about dinner, if you think I’m to be trusted around the stove,” and walked quickly out of the room, feeling the silence close behind her like a door.

  The meat was overdone, the small green peas mushy, the potatoes past their delicate prime. Rebelliously, Elizabeth ate nothing at all. Oliver talked about a traffic accident in the Sumner Tunnel; Constance shook her head perfunctorily and began an anecdote of her own. Elizabeth nodded blankly at intervals and could not break out of the other world, the place of terror.

  Fire. The hatred, bored and sated by the delicate vibrations it had set up in her life, could feed for a time on this new and more personal excitement—the destruction of her book, the charring of her studio, the more subtle issue of her irresponsibility when alone, her need to be watched.

  But this too would pall, and what then?

  The children.

  There might be a step between, but unless the evil were caught and stopped, it must certainly come to that. To Maire and Jeep, fast asleep upstairs, Maire with her pig within reach of her small relaxed hand. Jeep with the head of his fly-swatter protruding neatly from under the blankets. . . .