The Dark on the Other Side Read online

  Michael kicked it out of the way. He knelt down and put his ear to her breast. Faint and abnormally slow, but it was there-the pounding of her heart. He straightened, studying the pale face with a mixture of different terrors. The closed lids veiled the eyes; he wondered what he would see in those eyes when the lids lifted.

  After a moment he stood up and went into the bedroom. When he came back, she hadn’t moved. Carefully he wrapped the bathrobe around her; the coldness of her skin and the sluggish pulse suggested shock. Then he set about the rest of the job. His mouth was set in a tight, twisted line as, using the neckties he had brought from the bedroom, he tied her wrists and ankles together.

  A pale, ugly dawn was breaking before she came to. Michael had tried everything he could think of to bring her out of her faint-wondering, all the while, whether he really wanted her to wake up. Faces in sleep or unconsciousness were like blank pages; waking intelligence, the expression of eyes and mouth, are what give individuality and character. What would he see when her eyes opened? The face, now familiar and beloved, of the girl he wanted; or the Medea figure who had stood over him with a knife?

  He had carried her back into the bedroom and piled every blanket he owned over the waxen body. He had bathed her face and rubbed her wrists. The slow, mechanical breathing did not change; the muscles of face and body remained flaccid. And the night wore on. It seemed to Michael at times as if the sun would never rise, as if some astronomical miscalculation had stopped the earth on its axis. Then the first sullen streaks stained the clouds; and her eyes opened.

  Michael saw what he had hoped, but not really expected, to see. His relief was so great that he dropped with a thud onto the edge of the bed. But the realization that dawned in her face, as memory returned, was almost worse than the madness he had feared. Her horror and consternation were genuine; if he had had any lingering doubts of her honesty, they vanished then. Her eyes moved from his face, downward, toward her bound wrists and ankles. They were hidden under the piles of blankets, but he knew she could feel the bonds.

  “I’ll take them off,” he said quickly. “I just wasn’t sure…It’s all right now, I’ll get them off…”

  He turned the covers back, and she twisted frantically away from his hands.

  “No-no! Leave them on, don’t let me-”

  “It’s gone,” Michael said, hardly knowing what he was saying. “It’s all right.”

  “How do you know?” Her voice was quieter, under a fierce control, but she still held herself away from him. Michael’s hands dropped back onto the blankets.

  “Don’t you see,” she went on, “that we can’t take the chance? I can’t take it, even if you will. Call your friend. Call Bellevue, some hospital. And leave me tied until they come for me.”

  Michael shook his head dumbly. He was incapable of speech, but she read his face, and her own expression changed. Her eyes flickered and then dropped away from his.

  “All right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I was upset. Untie me.”

  She held her bound wrists toward him. The cloth was soft, and he had not tied the knots tightly; but he saw the red marks on her wrists, and his first impulse was to do as she asked. Yet he hesitated-noting her reluctance to meet his eyes, remembering the quick, cunning expression that had flickered across her face.

  “What will you do if I untie you?” he asked.

  Her silence was all the answer he needed. The minute his back was turned, she would run, and not stop running until she had found a safe padded cell in which to hide. She might even go back to Gordon, she was desperate enough for that… And through the black despair that enveloped him he felt an incongruous flash of something like triumph. She hadn’t reacted this way after her attempt on Gordon. Rather than risk hurting him, she would run to meet the fate she had been fleeing.

  “No,” he said decisively. “Not that way, Linda.”

  Her eyes blazed up at him, and she started to speak. The words caught in her throat as they heard the sound of a knock at the front door.

  The same idea came to both their minds simultaneously: Gordon. Michael moved just in time to stop the scream that had gathered in her throat. He knew what she meant to do, and he knew what his course of action must be. The struggle was short but ugly, because now he was not fighting some sick manifestation of hate, but Linda herself. When he stood up, he was wet with perspiration. His stomach contracted in a spasm of sickness as he looked down at the writhing figure on the bed-gagged with a towel, its wrists and ankles tied firmly to the bedposts. The knock was repeated. It had come again twice while he was…Whoever it was must know he was there.

  Michael turned on his heel and went out, closing the bedroom door tightly behind him. As he reached the front door the knock was repeated. He wrenched the door open with a violence that did little to relieve his fury and frustration. He was almost hoping that his surmise was correct. It would have been a pleasure to get his hands on Randolph.

  But it was not Randolph. It was his secretary.

  “Good morning,” Briggs said politely.

  Michael stared back at him, deflated and uncertain. He was not sure of Briggs’s role. Involved he must be, but perhaps only as one of Gordon’s blinded disciples. If that was the case…Michael’s stomach contracted as he remembered what lay on the bed in the next room. Linda wouldn’t be the only one to be locked up if Briggs happened to see that pretty picture.

  “Good morning,” he answered, wondering how his voice could sound so normal. “Looking for something?”

  Briggs blinked; a sly, appreciative smile moved his mouth. The expression was so ugly that Michael fell back a step. Briggs took advantage of his movement to enter.

  The man was dressed in an imitation of Gordon’s impeccable taste. The suit had been well fitted; but not even Savile Row could have done much with Briggs’s figure. The expensive leather belt had slid down below the equator of his round belly, and the Italian silk tie curved out to follow the hump. In his hand Briggs held a hat. He put it down on a table and glanced around the room.

  “Nice place you have here,” he said.

  There was no sound from the bedroom. Michael wondered whether Linda had recognized Briggs’s voice and found him too much even for her new resolution. He couldn’t risk it, though. He had to get the man out of here.

  “I don’t like to seem inhospitable,” he said, “but I’m just about to go out.”

  It was such a glaring lie, considering the hour and the state of Michael’s apparel, that Briggs didn’t bother to comment. But another of those faint, unpleasant smiles touched his pale mouth.

  “Oh, I shan’t stay. I just came by at Mr. Randolph’s request. You haven’t seen anything of Mrs. Randolph, I suppose?”

  A series of soft thuds came from behind the closed door. Michael glanced at it.

  “That damned cat,” he said.

  “Your cat? How nice that you have a pet.”

  “If you don’t mind…” Michael felt he couldn’t control himself much longer. In about thirty seconds he was going to grab Briggs by the collar of his pretty suit and heave him out the door.

  “Yes…You see, there was a sad occurrence last night. You remember our local witch, I’m sure. Apparently she got carried away by one of her experiments and set her house on fire.”

  “Really?” His tone didn’t even convince Michael himself, but suddenly he no longer cared. Briggs knew. He knew all about everything.

  “Yes,” Briggs cooed. “Very sad. Burned to a crisp, the poor old lady was. Well, naturally Mr. Randolph thought Linda might have been involved.”

  “Linda,” Michael repeated.

  “I think of her that way,” Briggs said, with an indescribable smirk. “I wish we could find her, helpher… She’s a beautiful young lady. A shameto have all that go to waste in some asylum.”

  Two things kept Michael from planting his fist right in the center of Briggs’s leer. One was the thought that it would be like hitting a fat woman. The other was the knowl
edge that Briggs was trying to anger him into an indiscreet act.

  “How is Mr. Randolph?” he asked.

  “Not well.” Briggs shook his head sadly. “He’s very upset, naturally. Knowing Linda’s sad history as he does, he wondered about what happened to Andrea. Luckily the evidence was destroyed. The body, I mean.”

  “I’m late now,” Michael said.

  “How thoughtless of me to keep you, then.” Briggs turned toward the door. Then he made a sudden dart to the side, his pudgy hand shooting out.

  “Here it is,” he exclaimed guilelessly, holding up a small black notebook. “Mr. Randolph thought he might have misplaced it here.”

  Michael looked at it.

  “ Randolph ’s? But it must have been here for days. I never saw it.”

  “Somehow it seems to have worked its way under a heap of magazines,” Briggs said blandly. “You busy writers aren’t the neatest housekeepers in the world, are you? He’ll be glad to have this back. And to think this was the reason why he asked me to stop by. I declare I’d have forgotten to ask if I hadn’t seen it, peeping out. Well, then…”

  “Wait a minute,” Michael said. An insane suspicion had entered his mind. “Let me see that.”

  Briggs surrendered the notebook without comment. Only his raised eyebrows indicated courteous surprise.

  Michael flipped through the pages of the notebook. It was an ordinary little loose-leaf pad, except that its cover was of tooled leather instead of plastic. It was certainly not Michael’s property, and the handwriting on the pages resembled what he remembered of Gordon’s script. The entries were cryptic and abbreviated; they might have been written in the sort of personal shorthand a busy man had developed in order to jot down appointments and reminders. A few of the signs reminded Michael of chemical or mathematical symbols.

  With some reluctance he returned the notebook to Briggs. He had an odd feeling that if he could study those entries at leisure, he might learn something important. But he couldn’t refuse to let the man have it, and the need to get Briggs out was stronger than any possible gain from the book.

  “Well, I must be running along,” Briggs said affably. “I hope you’ll excuse the intrusion, at this hour. I have a busy day ahead of me. Oh, and by the way…”

  Already in the doorway, he turned.

  “If Linda should turn up, do be kind to the poor girl.”

  “Naturally.”

  “But don’t forget…”

  “Forget what?” Michael snapped.

  “She might be dangerous,” Briggs said softly. “Be careful.”

  He went out, and just in time; the itching in Michael’s fingers was almost intolerable. He slammed the door and leaned against it, twisting his hands together. When he was able to speak without stammering, he went back to the bedroom.

  She lay quiet, staring at him over the gag, her eyes liquid and enormous. Michael took the gag off and untied the cords that held her down. Neither spoke. He sat down on the edge of the bed, knowing he dared not touch her, and watched the tears slide down her cheeks and soak into the pillow on either side of her face.

  II

  Michael put down the telephone.

  “They expect him tonight or early tomorrow,” he said. Sun streamed in the window. It was mid-morning, and a beautiful spring day. Outside. The room had another atmosphere. They had both fought their way back to some kind of calm, but the air was cold with tension.

  “Tonight,” Linda repeated thoughtfully.

  “Or tomorrow. He never knows till the last minute what plane he’ll be catching. Usually he wires to let them know, but not always; he drives himself, so he doesn’t have to be met.”

  Michael knew he must sound like a host trying to entertain an unwanted guest. He couldn’t help it; something had happened to his brain. Up to this point he had been able to consider and discuss everything that had happened; he had even been able to apply logic to a concept that was considered to be beyond logic. But last night…His mind balked at that, he couldn’t even think about it, much less discuss it. He was behaving as if it hadn’t happened. Which was not only stupid; it was potentially dangerous.

  He looked at Linda. Sitting upright on the bed, she sipped her coffee. Her hands were free, but her ankles were still bound; at her insistence, he had again fastened them to the footboard of the bed. He had felt sick while doing it, and he felt sick every time he looked. But it was a small price to pay for the composure of her face. She had fought this latest catastrophe, and come through it, as she had come through all the others; but he thought that she must be like someone clinging to a single strand of rope, over an abyss, slipping inexorably down each time her grasp on reality failed. The frantic hands might tighten, temporarily stopping the descent, or even claw their way back up the rope, a few precious inches toward safety. But inevitably the grasp would weaken again, and each time the fall would be arrested a little farther down, toward the end of the rope and the final plunge.

  “I left a message,” he said. “Asking him to call the minute he gets in.”

  “We’re acting like children,” Linda said. “Waiting for this man as if he were God, or…Why do you think he can help us?”

  “I don’t. I just don’t know what else to do.”

  “How is your arm?”

  “Hurts. It’s not that, nor the fact that I’m bushed. Something’s happened to what passes for my brain. I can’t…I can’t think.”

  “Physical exhaustion doesn’t help,” she said, with a briskness that was contradicted by the tenderness of her mouth. They both knew that they could not afford an exchange of sympathies. In a battle, minor wounds must go untended.

  “My own brain isn’t working very well either,” she went on. “But one thing is clear, Michael. I can’t spend another night with you.”

  “It’s a good thing nobody is listening to this conversation,” Michael said wryly.

  She gave him a strained smile.

  “I mean it, though.”

  “Why is it night you’re afraid of? Isn’t that childish too?”

  “Fear of the dark…Maybe. But everything that has happened so far happened at night.”

  “When the powers of evil walk abroad…”

  “You see? It means something to you. What was it you said, last night-about the dark on the other side?”

  Michael twitched uncomfortably.

  “Kwame-Joe Schwartz-said that. About Gordon. He was talking about the old Platonic image of the shadows on the wall of the cave, but it turned me cold to hear him, I can tell you. Not the shadows, but the Things that cast the shadows, the Things that prowl the dark, on the other side of the fire. Gordon knows about them, he said. It was pretty obvious that he did, too.”

  “Poor Joe.”

  “He takes dope,” Michael said. “Some kind of hallucinogenic.”

  “But you don’t. Why does the phrase make you so uncomfortable?”

  “Racial memory?” Michael offered wildly. “Some hairy, beetle-browed ancestor of mine, squatting in his cave, with his puny fire and his club the only defense against the things that prowled outside in the dark. Saber-toothed tigers and mastodons…”

  There was no answering spark of amusement in her face.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “Well…Too many horror stories when I was a kid. The other side of what? Eternity? The threshold of this world? The doorway that separates the living from the dead? Spiritualists talk about ‘the other world,’ don’t they, to describe the region from which they get their communications?” He was getting interested; he went on, catching the impressions as they floated up into consciousness. “When Kwame talked of the dark on the other side of the fire, he was thinking of The Republic, but also of that other image. This world, narrow and circumscribed as opposed to the spiritual reality of the other side. The dark…That idea is not in Plato, damn it, if I remember my classics, which I probably don’t. For him, the non-material, ideal world was one of light, of true consciousness. A
spiritualist would see it that way, too. What do the discarnate entities keep mumbling when they are asked about their world?”

  “Sunshine, light, flowers, love,” Linda said promptly.

  “Right. So why does this world of light and flowers seem to Kwame to be transmuted into darkness-not empty night, but a place where shadows live? Darkness and light, the primeval symbols of evil and good; the notion of a balance of forces, eternally warring, never ending. There are times, for everyone, when he feels himself the plaything of forces from somewhere outside, forces beyond his control, which strike him when he least expects it. ‘Out of the night that covers me…’”

  “Imagery, poetic,” Linda said, as his voice trailed away. “It’s frightening, though, isn’t it? ‘Black as the pit from pole to pole…’”

  “Poetic imagery is part of the picture I get. Black as the pit…black as Hell…There’s a nice conventional image of fire and darkness for you.”

  “The familiar Calvinist Hell.”

  “It’s funny,” Michael went on thoughtfully, “how many of the pre-Christian afterworlds were dark. That terrible twilight place the classical poets describe, where the dead speak with faint voices like the piping of birds… Didn’t the Egyptians go down under the earth into darkness where the sun-god never came?”

  “You’re out of my field,” Linda said.

  “Darkness and light, black and white; even the colors have symbolism. White is the color of purity, the garments of the Virgin and the priest… What’s the matter?”

  “Sorry. It reminded me of Briggs, and every time I think of him I get a chill.”

  “Why Briggs?” Michael grinned. “Not the color of purity, surely.”

  “Didn’t you know? No, I suppose you wouldn’t. Gordon must have told you about Briggs’s being unfairly dismissed from his job, and all that? He never told you what the job was, though… Briggs is an unfrocked priest.”

  “What?”

  “I guess that sounds melodramatic. Actually, he was a student for the priesthood. They threw him out. Very politely, I imagine. I can also imagine why.”