The Dark on the Other Side Read online

  The Dark on the Other Side

  Barbara Michaels

  The house talked; Linda Randolph could hear it. The objects in it talked, too, but the house's voice was loudest. Linda was afraid that, as her husband suggested, she was losing her mind. Either that, or her husband was involved with dark, brutal forces beyond the limits of human sanity.

  Barbara Michaels

  The Dark on the Other Side

  To Laurie,

  who likes to read about adventures;

  and Amy,

  who likes to have them;

  and Mike,

  because he let me use his name;

  and Douglass,

  because he is Douglass

  With love

  Chapter 1

  I

  THE HOUSE TALKED.

  The objects in it talked, too-chairs, tables, couches, a big, squashy hassock that squatted obscenely in a corner of the bedroom. But the voice of the house was loudest. It was a thin, high voice, like that of an old woman. Hunched on its hill, like a fat old woman crouching on her haunches, its wings spread out like the folds of a ragged skirt, its wide terrace apronlike, its tower a thin neck, wattled and scaled with lichen, the house talked. Sometimes it said, Run away…leave him…if you can. Sometimes it wailed, I wish he’d die…

  Sometimes its suggestion was more direct.

  II

  Gordon didn’t tell her that there would be a guest until just before dinner. Linda was sitting at her dressing table, elbows carelessly asprawl on the polished glass top. In the tall triple mirrors, her bedroom looked strange-not like a reflection of reality, but like another room, all the more disturbing because it contained the same furniture as her room, in the same positions, and yet looked subtly wrong. Like hers, it was decorated in shades of blue and white-cool, virginal colors, restful and remote. The drapes framing the tall windows were the deep, rich blue of the sky at late evening; their heavy velvet did not reflect light, but drank it in and absorbed it, so that the hoarded gold gave the blue a glowing luster. Because she had expressed a dislike for wall-to-wall carpeting, Gordon had had the floors redone; they were stained dark, unvarnished but shining like black glass with repeated applications of wax. Glass, or black water… The scattered rugs lay like little icebergs on a dark sea. Now, reflected, the ragged white islands seemed to move, rocking slightly as if shifted by the dark, shimmery surface on which they lay.

  When Gordon came in, she didn’t look up. Behind her mirrored image his face floated into view like something conjured up into a crystal ball-but familiar, wearing its old look of fond anxiety.

  He was a very handsome man, Gordon. He’d be forty on his next birthday; and he was as alarmed, and as amused at his own alarm, as any pretty woman would be at the onset of that ominous day. The years had only added to his good looks-a brush of white at the temples, stark and distinctive against his thick black hair, a deepening of the lines of laughter that fanned out from the corners of his eyes. A man with eyes like that oughtn’t to look so masculine; they were big and dark and luminous, fringed with lashes so long and thick they looked artificial. But there was nothing in the least effeminate about Gordon’s face-or mind, or body.

  Next to his, her own face was wraithlike. Too pale, too thin, with suggestive dark circles under the eyes and an undue prominence of certain muscles. Those long tendons in the throat especially-the throat he had admired, had compared with that of the lovely statue of Nefertiti…

  She turned her head, watching the effect, and her pale mouth, as yet unpainted for public appearance, writhed distastefully as the lines tightened and drew. Gordon’s mouth moved. She raised her eyes to meet his mirrored eyes, and felt herself frowning.

  “What?”

  “I said,” he repeated patiently, “that we have a guest for dinner, and the weekend. So look your loveliest, won’t you? If you are to be immortalized, I want it to be as you really are.”

  He was always so patient. It was almost the most maddening thing about him.

  Then the meaning of what he had said finally penetrated, and she turned her head to stare at him.

  He had retreated to the hassock, the one she particularly loathed, and was sitting with a grace a twenty-year-old might have envied, one knee bent, his long brown hands curled around it.

  “Immortalized?” she repeated, articulating carefully.

  “But, darling, I told you last week…” He stopped. That was one of the things he must never do, remind her that she kept forgetting things. He started all over again, as if she had never heard the subject mentioned; only the straight vertical line between his brows showed his perturbation.

  “Our guest’s name is Michael Collins. He’s the young man Manhattan magazine has commissioned to do a series of profiles on me. I’m very flattered, you know; usually they select important people as subjects.”

  “You’re important,” she said. It was not a compliment. It was simply a statement.

  “Maybe I was, once. But you know I don’t give a damn about being what the idiot world calls important.”

  Linda shrugged and turned back to the mirror. The top of her dressing table was covered with bottles and jars, with creams and lotions and cosmetics, all the expensive playthings of a woman of wealth and fashion. They were in perfect order, their shining caps free of the slightest speck of dust. Anna, her maid, straightened them every day.

  She reached out at random and took a lipstick out of a jeweled holder that held a dozen of them. Applying it to her mouth, she said, “I suppose you want me to get dressed up.”

  “What about that robe I got you last week? The one with the gold threads?”

  “It’s too big.” She tipped her head, studying her mouth. “My lipstick’s on crooked.”

  “As a mere male it’s not up to me to comment,” said Gordon drily. “But if you will insist on talking while you apply the stuff-”

  He broke off at the sound of a knock on the door. In some big houses servants weren’t supposed to knock; so Linda had read. But Gordon insisted on his privacy. She watched, in the mirror, as the door of that other room opened, and the reflected image of her maid, Anna, sidled in. The girl looked even sillier in the glass. She was a silly-looking creature at best, with her teased blond wig and adenoidal, half-witted gape; and the mirror distorted her face as it warped every other object it reflected. The sidelong glance she gave Gordon had a sly, conspiratorial gleam. Of course, she had a crush on him; all the women in the house had, from the fat Bavarian cook to the gardener’s ten-year-old daughter.

  Even in the foul mirror Gordon’s face remained unchanged. She couldn’t accuse him of leering at the maids. But he had better taste than that. Anna’s figure was good, and was adequately displayed; Gordon insisted on uniforms, but he went along, good-humoredly, with the shorter skirts, and Anna’s black dress verged on a musical-comedy maid’s outfit. She had good legs. But that staring, vacant face…

  Linda whirled around.

  “I don’t want you,” she said. “Get out.”

  “Now, honey.” Gordon rose; coming up behind her, he lifted the heavy masses of her black hair between his hands. “Let the poor girl fix your hair, at any rate. I told you, I want you to look beautiful. Anna, Mrs. Randolph will wear that gold thing-I don’t know what you women call it-”

  “The Persian brocade hostess gown,” Anna said promptly. “If you mean the dress you bought last week, Mr. Randolph.”

  “That’s the one. Hostess gown? You’re right; that’s what the salesgirl called it.” He grinned at Anna, who, without moving a muscle, managed to suggest a puppy wriggling happily at a caress. “Well, I’ll get out of the way and leave you to it.”

  Linda wiped off the cr
ooked outline on her upper lip and sat with lipstick poised, watching Anna trot over to the long closet and take out the dress. As the girl laid it carefully across the bed her hands lingered, smoothing the heavy fabric. It was a beautiful thing; heaven only knew what treasured antique the dressmaker had cut up in order to make it. It didn’t look like modern fabric; the muted blues and pinks and golds might have formed part of a sultan’s regalia a century before. Linda reapplied her lipstick. It was a bright orange-red. The color would clash horribly with the dress. She ought to use another shade.

  She dropped the carved gold case on the table top and reached down into the lowest drawer of the dressing table.

  “Get me a glass,” she ordered, taking the top off the bottle. The contents, half gone, swam amber gold with the movement of her hands.

  Anna hesitated, her eyes bulging as they focused on the bottle.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Linda asked gently. “Hurry up. You lazy little fool.”

  Anna jumped, and then ran into the bathroom. Linda took the glass without looking at it or the girl who held it. She poured it half full. Her elbows on the table, she sipped, and watched Anna in the mirror; and Anna stared back with her big, bulging, watery-blue eyes.

  Cocktails in the den before dinner. Very classy, Linda thought, for a cop’s daughter from Cleveland. She came down the stairs carefully, holding up her heavy skirts with one hand. The other hand, beringed and graceful, trailed nonchalantly along the curved mahogany rail. She didn’t need to hold on. A couple of drinks-or even three or four-didn’t affect her at all, physically, except to dull the sharpness of her hearing. With a couple of drinks-or maybe three or four-she could hardly hear the voice of the house.

  There was no one in the marble-floored foyer to appreciate her entrance, so she turned to the right and went along the hall, past the drawing room, past the morning room, past the dining room; her skirts rustling stiffly, her head high. Why not the drawing room for cocktails? she wondered. Why the study? That was Gordon’s room, as the dainty-chintz morning room was supposed to be hers. Usually he didn’t allow casual visitors into his sanctum. Oh, but this man was not a casual visitor. He was…something about a biography. That explained the study. Michael What’s-’is-name was going to get the full effect-the rows on rows of learned volumes, the windows opening onto the beauty of the countryside. And in the midst of it all, Gordon himself, the sage, the scholar, who had abandoned the hollow sham of the world for a life of contemplation.

  The door was open. She could hear their voices as she approached: Gordon’s mellow baritone, the softer, higher voice of Jack Briggs, Gordon’s secretary, and another voice…deeper even than Gordon’s, slower, drawling. For no reason at all, a shiver ran through her and she stopped, knees waxy-soft, and put one hand out blindly for support against the satiny surface of the paneled wall.

  The spasm lasted only a second. She shook herself and went on, wondering. Something was going to happen. Good or bad? Were there such categories, or were things-happenings, people-amoral, to be judged only by their effects on others? “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so…”

  She came to the door and stood there, looking at them.

  Amid the bustle of their rising, she caught two swift impressions. One was the barely perceptible relief in Gordon’s face as he took in her appearance: exquisitely gowned, coiffed, and made up, poised and calm. The other impression was simply that of a man, a stranger, and never, afterward, could she reduce it to details. He was there; his presence was enough.

  Yet he was not, on second glance, a particularly good-looking man. A few inches taller even than Gordon’s respectable height, he seemed to be strung together with old elastic, so that his movements looked gawky and abrupt beside Gordon’s disciplined grace. His hair was mousy brown, combed carelessly back from a side parting; his mouth was too wide and his face had a lopsided look, as if one jaw were longer than the other. The only feature that might be called handsome were his eyes, and their beauty lay in their expression rather than their color, which was a brown slightly darker than his hair.

  “How do you do,” she said, and gave him her hand. With the touch of his hard, square fingers, the flash of empathy faded. He was just another man, and this was just another normal social occasion.

  She sat down in one of the big, soft leather chairs and watched with amusement as Collins tried to get his long arms and legs folded back into a sitting position. Gordon was hovering. He looked pathetically pleased, and it was significant, she knew, that he nodded at Briggs without making her ask for a drink.

  Briggs bustled over to the bar and began fussing with ice cubes, bottles, and glasses. Linda’s nerves tightened as she watched him. She detested him even more than she did the other servants-although, as Gordon’s secretary, he was not to be regarded, or treated, as a servant. He was a pale, puffy man; the texture of his skin suggested clay or bread dough, some substance that would not rebound elastically from the prod of a finger, but would retain the impression. Gordon claimed that he was a very efficient secretary. She found that hard to believe. His movements, when away from the typewriter, were fussy, slow, and inept. Finally he came back with her drink, and she tried not to touch his hand as she took it. His fingers were always damp.

  “We were just discussing Michael’s last book, Linda,” Gordon said. “I think you read it; I know I recommended it to you.”

  So they were on first-name terms already.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, and sipped her drink. “I read it. It was very good.”

  She saw Michael flush a little at the coldness of the compliment, and added smoothly, “I particularly liked the chapter on the relationship between Emily and Bramwell. You caught something there which no other biographer has understood.”

  His wide mouth curved up, bringing out a line in one cheek, a line too long to be called a dimple.

  “What was that?”

  Linda looked at him in surprise. So Michael Collins wasn’t quite the gauche young fool he looked. A compliment was meaningless to him unless it was genuine.

  “The fact that, though he loved her desperately, he resented her talent. Oh, I know the point’s been made; but you seemed to comprehend so fully the effect on the frustrated male ego, and the conflict between her feeling of feminine inferiority and the inevitable awareness of her own genius. Very few men can look at that problem dispassionately, with sympathy for both points of view.”

  He settled back in his chair, nursing his glass between his hands and smiling. His eyes were remarkable, Linda thought; they mirrored his feelings candidly, without evasion or concealment.

  “And,” she added, “you did it without resorting to the psychological jargon that’s so popular today.”

  “It’s hard to avoid,” Michael said. “It has become part of our unconscious thinking.”

  Gordon said interestedly, “A person untrained in psychology-which includes most of us, I suppose-doesn’t even use the jargon accurately. If a psychiatrist speaks of paranoia, he is trying to pinpoint a specific syndrome. Whereas a writer, and the majority of his readers, get a much more generalized, and probably wildly inaccurate, picture of behavior.”

  “That’s true,” Michael agreed. “But I was thinking more in terms of the way vocabulary reflects changing cultural patterns. Words don’t convey a single specific image; they suggest a vast complex of ideas, emotions, and states of knowledge. When we speak of ‘guilt,’ for instance, we’re using the same word that occurs in-oh, St. Augustine, let’s say, and Sophocles. But for each of them the word had implications which a modern jurist no longer considers.”

  “A better example might be the word ‘mad.’”

  The voice was soft and gentle. There was no reason why it should have startled Linda so badly that the glass almost fell from her hand. She drained its contents. Briggs, rising to refill it, continued in the same mellifluous voice.

  “The medieval world, assured of the reality of God and the devil, reg
arded madness as possession by an evil spirit. We have murdered God by reason; we try to deny the powers of evil by inventing new terms to explain the aberrant behavior that men of the Middle Ages attributed to demons.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I meant,” Michael said. “Vocabulary reflects the accepted world view of the period. Psychological terminology, however badly used, indicates our rejection of the cruder superstitions of the past.”

  There was silence when he stopped speaking. Linda sat upright in her chair, feeling, but not responding to, the intense anxiety of Gordon’s regard. Belatedly, Michael seemed to sense the change in the atmosphere.

  “I try to avoid jargon of all kinds in my writing,” he said awkwardly. “Just as I try to avoid strained interpretations of human relationships based on the standard perversions.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that,” Gordon said heartily, and Michael laughed. Linda’s hand clenched around the glass Briggs handed her. The secretary went to refill the other glasses.

  “Gordon’s dying to know what you’ll say about him,” Linda said. “But of course he’s too smart to ask outright.”

  Gordon started to speak, but Michael anticipated him, so smoothly that perhaps no one except Linda noticed how he used the words like a barrier, to shield Gordon from the malice of the speech.

  “I don’t know myself, yet. What I’m doing now is soaking up atmosphere, if you’ll pardon the expression. And very pleasant it is-thank you.”

  He lifted his glass with a slight bow that was aimed, impartially, at a spot midway between his host and hostess.

  “We’re trying to prejudice you,” Gordon said, smiling.

  “I’m always prejudiced right from the first. I’m in favor of people.”

  “How nice of you,” Linda murmured.

  This time it was Gordon who came to the aid of his guest. The two of them, Linda thought irritably, worked together as smoothly as Laurel and Hardy. The flush on Michael’s face subsided as Gordon talked, blandly and inconsequentially, of words and their meanings, of books and authors and libraries.