The vehicles on the deck were parked bumper to bumper, but he managed to find room enough to thread his way forward and around the end of the deck. A flight of stairs led upward to the passenger levels. As he started to climb, the ferry gave a lurch, and the throb of its engines became louder. He had to cling to the handrail for balance until he reached the upper deck.
He came out of the stairwell just in time to see the old wood pilings of the slip glide away past the rail. Beyond them was the glittering expanse of the harbor.
It was quite a sight. The moving velvet of the dark water reflected the jeweled skyline, causing the reflected buildings to shift and shimmer like a city from a fairy-tale. Several couples were leaning against the rail and gazing at the view raptly.
It had no effect on Morton. As far as he was concerned, there was only one sort of beauty in the world, and it had nothing to do with black water and silvery lights.
Beauty was red. Beauty was blood. Beauty was the moist cavern of a woman’s mouth, screaming.
The wind on the upper deck was brisk, and he directed his feet toward the warmth of the cabin. At the door, he paused and looked through the glass panel. The passenger cabin was fully lighted and filled with people smoking, reading magazines and newspapers, conversing with one another, or simply staring into space.
It was a crowd, and Mortem detested crowds. He preferred to fight the cold rather than subject himself to the fascinated gaze of strangers.
He bundled his shoulders against the wind and began strolling along the deck.
The lights of the Manhattan shore had receded now, and die ferry seemed lost in a sea of darkness. In the distance, the red and green running lights of some anchored ships could be seen, and now and then the mournful bell of a buoy would sound from somewhere below. Most of the passengers cm the promenade stood near the front erf the vessel, watching the lights of their destination draw closer, so Morton walked along the deck until he had come to the stern.
There was only one other person back there; a young girl, dressed in a light-colored coat, standing with her elbows resting on the rail and staring off toward Manhattan. Morton glanced at her once, noted she had nice legs, then dismissed her from his mind. He had too many things to occupy Iris thoughts—things far more important than young girls.
He crossed his forearms on the rail and looked down. Below him was the lighted edge of the car deck; beyond that he could see the soapy swell of the ferry’s wake foaming away into the darkness. It made patterns in the black water—fascinating swirls and loops, circles and ovals coming and going in an ever-changing mosaic of white foam mid black water. It became hypnotic after a while, and he let his mind be drawn into it.
Black and white, shifting and flowing—black as pitch, white as bone, all mixing and blending together.
It made him think of Madam Fury.
White flesh, naked, hot, smooth, taut—Madam Fury’s flesh, as milky-pale as the gleaming brow of a skull.
And black. Around her waist, a black belt—yes, she’d wear a black belt. And black high-heeled shoes, too, shoes with cruel spike-heels, heels so high she would almost have to stand on her toes, making all the solid muscles in her calves bunch up and flex delightfully.
White again—a thin-fingered colorless hand, colorless except for the blood-red talons of her nails, and that hand would be clutched around . . .
Black. A black whip. A bull-whip, a long hideous snake of cruel leather, with barbs on the end of it.
Black and white. And, of course, red. On the black whip, red blood. Across her white flesh, red welts. Around her trembling body, an aura of palpitating red, flaring luridly in time with the wild beating of his heart . . .
Something dropped on the deck with a clunk.
He tore his eyes from the water reluctantly, and glanced up, alert for any possible danger. It took him a moment to locate the source of the sound. It had come from the girl on the opposite side of the deck; she had dropped her purse near her feet.
He was about to turn his eyes back to the water patterns, when he realized the girl wasn’t moving. She acted as if she weren’t aware her purse had fallen, although Morton knew that was impossible, considering the sound it had made.
What the hell was the matter with her? Was she asleep? Or drunk? Or just too stupid to connect the noise with the fact that she wasn’t holding her purse any more?
He made a face and shook his head. Just another stupid broad. The world was filled with them.
Once more he began to turn his head, but again she drew his attention. She moved, and for an instant he thought she was going to bend down and pick up her purse. He wished she would. The fallen purse was an object out of place, and Morton’s orderly mind found it annoying.
She made no attempt to recover her purse. Instead, she straightened up and gripped the rail with both hands. Then she put her foot on the lower rung of the rail, lifted her other leg, and swung it over.
Morton caught a flash of pale thigh as the girl straddled the rail. Her back was still to him, but he could tell from the tense angle of her shoulders and arms that she was feeling some strong emotion.
And all at once, he realized she was about to commit suicide.
The scene hung suspended for an interminable instant Everything seemed to freeze; the thrum of the engines below paused in mid-stroke, the seething water solidified like wax, the wind-whipped tail of the girl’s coat and the cloudy strands of her hair paused in mid-air, as if a flash photograph had captured the moment in every detail.
Then, she began to tip forward.
Morton moved quickly. He didn’t take lime to examine his motives; if he had, he would have been quite unable to explain himself. But something about the sight of that girl’s body teetering on the edge of oblivion stirred him into action. He raced across the deck toward her as she leaned out over the dark water.
Death, he thought. If she fell, she would die. Her body would be grabbed up by the suction of the ferry’s blades and chopped to bits, reduced to a gruesome hash in an instant. One moment, she would be a girl—alive, warm, breathing. The next moment, she would cease to be anything but a mass of bloodied and splintered refuse sinking slowly to the greasy bottom of the harbor.
The image was so clear in his mind that he cried out. She heard him. She turned her head in his direction. Morton was almost upon her, his hands reaching out, his fingers clutching the air inches from her lapels.
She saw him, and a look of horror crossed her face. Her knee lifted, and suddenly she wasn’t straddling the rail any more; she was sitting on it, with her feet dangling free over the swirling water. Her buttocks slipped from the rail, and she began to drop into the darkness.
Then he had her.
His fingers caught the material of her coat just under the armpits, and clenched fiercely. Her falling body was brought up short, and Morton felt the muscles of his powerful arms howl with pain as the shock ran up into him. The girl swung against the rail with a thump, and went limp as a bag of potatoes.
Morton looked down at her. Her head was lolling limply on one shoulder. She seemed to be unconscious.
He took a deep breath, and pulled her upward, tensing all file muscles of his back and shoulders. She wasn’t very heavy, but the angle was awkward, and it took most of his strength to lift her into a position where he could fling an arm around her waist. After that, it was an easy matter to haul her over the rail and back to safety.
He held her in his arms with her head resting on his shoulder, and glanced around quickly. There was no one in sight. Nobody had witnessed the girl’s attempt to kill herself.
And a damned good thing, too, thought Morton. Wherever there was a suicide—even an attempted one—there were bound to be police. And the law was something Morton avoided at all times. He realized how big a risk he’d run in saving the girl; if any trouble had developed from the incident, he would at least have missed his appointment with Madam Fury, and perhaps ended up with even worse trouble.
; His luck was running good. At the moment, his only problem was the girl.
What the hell was he going to do with her?
He considered leaving her where she lay, then abandoned the idea. She’d only wake up again, and probably take the leap. He didn’t want that to happen after he’d gone to the trouble of saving her.
The unanswered question was, why had he bothered to save her in the first place? He couldn’t begin to fathom his motives. Whatever they were, his act had made the girl his responsibility, at least for the time being.
He looked around again. Nearby was a set of stairs leading up to a pilot house. Unlike most vessels, the Staten Island ferry does not turn around at the end of its. journey, but has a set of screws and controls at both the bow arid the stem. Right now, the engines at this end were in operation, while the pilot controlled the ferry from a cabin up front.
He walked the girl across the deck, lifting her by the waist so that her feet didn’t drag along the plates, and carried her up the ladder. He set her down on the top step. He didn’t attempt to open the pilot house. Up here, he and the girl would be out of sight, and that was sufficient.
He squeezed himself down beside her and lifted her shoulders onto his lap. The night was moonless, but there was enough light from the stars and the reflections in the water for him to see her face.
She seemed to be very young. Her face was innocent and mild—part of that, he imagined, was because of her unconsciousness. She had light brown hair, which fell in long soft strands around her face. Her lips were very full, but void of color, and almost as pale as the skin of her throat.
He leaned his face over hers, suddenly beginning to wonder if she were alive or not. Perhaps the impact erf her body against the ferry’s side had killed her. It was unlikely, but not impossible. It would be a grim joke on him if he was cradling a corpse in his arms at that moment. A grim joke—and damned hard to explain should a policeman come wandering around.
He thought he felt the faint stir erf her breath against hit cheek, but he couldn’t be sure in the harbor wind. He put a palm on her throat and felt for a pulse, but the drumming of the ferry’s engines made everything vibrate at the same rate, so he couldn’t be certain of that, either.
He flipped back one of the lapels of her coat. She was wearing a light green dress With a square-cut neck. His fingers touched her flesh just above the edge of the material, paused for an instant, then dipped into her neckline.
His hand rode down her smooth flesh, mounted a soft rise, and was suddenly filled with the shape of one bare breast.
She wasn’t wearing a brassiere.
On impulse, he slid his other hand up beneath her skirt arid felt along the softness of her thigh until his fingers could go no farther.
She wasn’t wearing panties, either.
He took his hand from beneath her dress but left the other where it was, cupped over the warm mound of her breast. His fingers moved from the perimeter, drawing together until they were grouped around the lax point of a nipple.
He teased the flesh expertly. In a few moments, the tip began to grow firm and ridged under his stimulation.
She was alive.
He removed his hand from her neckline and was wondering what he should do next, when he heard her moan. He looked into her face, and saw her eyelids flutter. Both color and expression flowed back into her features as he watched, and long before she opened her eyes he realized she was even more beautiful than he had at first thought.
Her lips parted, and she made a small moist sound in her throat. A moment later, she opened her eyes. It took a while for her pupils to focus, and when they did Morton was startled at the blackness and depth of her eyes.
Their gazes locked for a long searching moment.
Without thinking;, Morton asked, “What’s the matter with you?”
The girl closed her eyes again. “I want to die,” she said.
* * *
Ginny was frightened.
She was frightened of the world, and of men, and of being alone. But above all, she was frightened of herself.
She stood in the familiar bedroom of her apartment for many minutes after completing the call, staring into space blank-eyed. She felt fragile as a china doll, as if she would shatter into pieces if she moved a muscle, or even allowed herself to think.
The receiver, which she still held in her hand, went click, then buzz. A voice spoke tinnily.
“This is a recorded announcement. There is a receiver off the hook on your line. Service will be restored as soon as that receiver is replaced. Thank you.” Click. “This is a recorded announcement . . .”
She hung up the receiver carefully, and the voice stopped.
Madam Fury, she thought. I spoke to her. I told her what was wrong. And she told me to come see her.
But that’s crazy.
She sat down on the edge of the bed, laced her fingers together, and clamped them between her knees. Her nerves were still ringing with the after-shock of her experience under the Boardwalk, and she needed time to recover her wits. She wondered if she’d ever recover them completely.
Ginny was a confused girl. Things had been piling up for her more rapidly than she could handle. Ever since that card had come into her hands, her life had been veering off in a new direction, a direction she had managed to avoid through all the years of her life so far.
First there had been the watching—the feeling of being devoured by some unknown person’s gaze—and that had been bad enough. Learning afterwards that the watcher had been a woman hadn’t helped at all, but had simply added an unwelcome note of mystery to the commonplace experience of being stared at.
Then, there had been the card. Questions had grown in Ginny’s mind where before there had been comfortable answers. The strange promise of the card had fed those questions, and the more they grew, the more uncertain Ginny became.
Then, there had been the dream. Silly to worry over a dream, and yet it had certainly played a part in what was happening to her. In the dream, she had felt herself trapped at last by the lustful world of men, helpless and naked before their devouring eyes, barely able to stay beyond their reach, and then only through the most terrific effort she could muster. All her worst fears had come to pass in that dream, and the ultimate terror had been about to grab her when the phantom figure had appeared, giving her a bed to lie on, a dark safe room to hide in, and a sweet caressing of the breasts to relax her.
It had all been perfect and: delightful, even if a trifle weird, and she’d awakened from the dream with the new concepts drawing together into a single concept, with all her questions merging into one key question.
If her walk along the shore had panned out as she had hoped, she might have been able to articulate that question to herself, balance it against what she knew, and come up with an answer. If she hadn’t made the mistake of walking beneath the Boardwalk, her life might still have been a calmly-ordered thing, a set of events she could deal with and understand.
But things hadn’t worked out that way. The young man had appeared—the filthy young man with his hard fists and grabbing hands and brutal lips and vile lusts. He had appeared from nowhere, the total personification of the men in her dream-corridor, and he had thrown her on her back and stripped her clothing from her body, and mauled her breasts and defiled her loins and left finger-welts all over her buttocks. She could feel the touch of him yet, like gutter slime caked on her flesh.
Only his own fumbling inadequacy had prevented him from dirtying her forever.
The young man under the Boardwalk, and the men in the corridor—in Ginny’s mind, they equalled the same thing. Trapped on the sunless sand, she’d felt her dream come true, felt her nightmare turn into reality.
The experience had left a curious mark on her mind.
Dream—she thought. Reality—which was which?
She didn’t know any more.
Flying down the corridor with the men jeering and beckoning to her on all sides—was it
the corridor of dreams or the corridor of life? And was the door leading to Madam Fury a figment of her imagination?
She picked up the card and looked at it again. One thing she knew, if nothing else: Madam Fury herself was real. Ginny had spoken to her.
“Yes?” The voice was as Ginny had expected—clipped, precise, knowing.
“Hello.”
Pause.
“To whom did you wish to speak?”
“Is this YEoman 6-6059?”
“That is correct.”
“Is this—” Pause again, and a struggle with words, a battle with the sudden icy fear that she was doing the wrong thing.
“Yes?” The voice—this time with a hint of softness in it, a faint touch of friendliness.
“—Madam Fury?” The words fell like stones from Ginny’s lips.
Another pause—this time, it seemed, forever. Then:
“Yes. This is Madam Fury.”
“I—I wanted to speak to you.”
“Yes?”
“I have your card. You left it in my diner—the diner where I work—last night. You were watching me.”
Somehow, the smile transmitted itself over the wires. “You knew I was watching you?”
“Yes. I could feel it.”
“You’re very beautiful.”
The remark was out of context for Ginny. She couldn’t do a thing with it. “I wanted to speak to you,” she said again.
“What do you wish?” The friendly tone of the voice was growing.
Ginny paused, then blurted the words. “I’m a virgin.”
“Yes,” said the voice. “I know that.”
“I’m frightened.”
“Frightened? Of what?”
“I don’t know. Men. I had a dream—I think. They’re after me. One of them almost got me. I’m all confused.”
“It’s all right.” The words were sweet as warm honey.
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