The Dark on the Other Side Page 6

  Only once before had she seen it so distinctly. It stood quite still. Still as a statue, still as a figure painted by a child or a primitive artist-an outline sketched by a sharp pen and filled in, solidly, with black ink. Yet the individual hairs, bristling along the curve of the back, were distinct; so was the heavy, predatory muzzle and the thrust of the head. The only lights in the whole mass were the eyes-red, luminous, glowing like coals.

  From a great distance Linda heard Michael’s voice repeating her name. She wasn’t pretending now, and he knew it. But his voice was lost in the shrieking cacophony of the other voices, the voices that had haunted her for months, risen now to a whirl of mocking laughter: We told you, we told you. Now it’s too late. Too late, too late, too late…

  Then all the voices faded into blackness and silence.

  Chapter 4

  I

  A SHARP, STINGING SCENT PIERCED LINDA’S LUNGS. she struggled, choking. Her face was all wet; cheeks and hands stung as if they had been slapped. Opening reluctant eyes, she saw a face near hers. It was not one of the faces she expected to see, and for a moment it was as unfamiliar as a total stranger’s. A round, florid man’s face, with horn-rimmed glasses and thick, iron-gray hair…Gold. Doctor Gold. Linda’s eyes closed again.

  “I’m all right,” she muttered, as the doctor waved the horrible-smelling thing under her nose again. “Don’t…”

  “Sure you’re all right,” he agreed smoothly. “Just fainted. Take it easy for a minute.”

  He patted her shoulder mechanically and stood up. Gordon must have dragged him away from a quiet evening at home; he was tieless, and pepper-and-salt stubble darkened his heavy jowls. As he moved away from her, Linda saw Andrea at the foot of the couch on which she was lying. The old woman was bent like a priest bowing before the Host; her hands wove patterns in the air and she crooned under her breath. A wave of feeble dislike swept Linda. How could she have had such faith in the old witch? Not that Andrea didn’t-know things. But she hadn’t been much help so far. Her behavior tonight had been maddeningly wrong, evoking hostility instead of sympathy. What on earth did she think she was doing now-summoning her friend’s wandering spirit back into her body?

  Her ritual completed, Andrea caught Linda’s eye. She leaned forward over the foot of the couch.

  “What was it?” she hissed.

  Linda shook her head. Stupid, stupid…she couldn’t talk about it here, Andrea knew that. But sooner or later she would have to tell Andrea about the latest appearance. Whom else could she talk to? No one else would believe her. Andrea only believed because she was half crazy herself.

  Her eyes pulled away from the avid demand in the older woman’s gaze. Michael was nowhere in sight; probably he had effaced himself, as any proper visitor would when the hostess was taken ill. Linda wondered where he was. She wondered why she cared-why this one man’s absence from a room could make it feel empty. Especially now, after that unexpected fiasco at the window…

  She forced herself to concentrate on the important presences. Gordon and Hank Gold made a significant little group, standing with their backs turned, talking in voices so low she could not make out the words. She didn’t need to hear, she knew what they were saying. Once Gordon had made her visit Gold professionally. The doctor had poked every muscle in her body and taken samples of everything that was detachable. Then he had sat and talked. She had not been in good shape that day; the trend of the conversation had got away from her. Finally she had had to invent an excuse for leaving. It was a flight, rather than departure, and Gold had been well aware of it. After that, she had refused to consult him again; had he not admitted that all her physical tests were normal? But she couldn’t prevent Gordon from inviting his friend and neighbor to dinner occasionally. She couldn’t always excuse herself on the grounds of a headache. She couldn’t keep Gordon from telling him things.

  And now-now she would have to fight. If there was the slightest hint, the least admission of what she thought she had seen…Panic twisted her stomach. Michael. Had she spoken to him in the last seconds, gasped out any damning description of the thing that stood glaring outside the window? There was no need to wonder whether he had seen it. No one saw it except she herself. Once, when she was showing Hank Gold the gardens, it had passed through the darkening twilight like a flash of black fog. Turning, at her startled exclamation, he had denied seeing anything except a shadow. That made it all the more important that she should not mention the word now-that deadly, ominous common noun.

  The conference ended. They turned and came to her, Gordon first, the doctor following, scratching at his chin.

  “Bed for you, baby,” Gordon said, with a forced smile. “Hank says you’ll be fine after a good night’s sleep.”

  Linda gathered her wits together.

  “Hank probably hates both of us,” she said. “Dragging him out in the middle of the night just because I fainted.”

  Gordon’s smile faded.

  “I couldn’t get you out of it,” he said. “This can’t go on, Linda. You must agree-”

  A hand on his arm stopped him. Gold was smiling, but his eyes gave him away.

  “This girl needs rest, Gordon, not a lecture. We’ll discuss it in the morning.”

  “Sorry,” Gordon muttered.

  “Nothing to be sorry about.” It was farcical, the contrast between Gold’s smile, his casual voice, and his intent, betraying stare. “Here, Linda, pop one of these down. Then off you go. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  It appeared as if by legerdemain, a small white capsule lost in the vast pink reaches of his hand.

  “What is it?” Linda asked.

  “Just a mild sedative. So you can sleep.”

  Trapped, Linda looked from the little pill to Gold’s face-pink, smiling and inexorable.

  Silently she took the capsule. What was the use?

  When she had swallowed it, both men seemed to heave a simultaneous sigh of relief. They expected more of a fight, Linda thought, and derived a faint, grim satisfaction from fooling them even that much. This was right; this was how she had to behave from now on. She had been wrong, before, to struggle openly.

  “I’ll carry you,” Gordon said.

  She waved him off.

  “Up all those stairs? I can walk perfectly well.”

  The room wavered as she sat up and Gold came to her assistance. She was glad to lean on the arm he offered. It was better than some of the other possibilities. Now that she was standing, she could see Michael, near the door. She walked slowly toward him, leaning on the doctor’s arm.

  It was impossible for her to tell, from his carefully controlled face, what he might have heard-or repeated. But she had to know.

  “What made me faint, Hank?” she asked, in a sweet, worried voice.

  “I can’t be sure, my dear, until we run a few tests.”

  Linda stopped, pulling on his arm.

  “But you gave me every test you could think of. You said I was fine.” Her voice rose; with an effort, she got control of herself. “I hate being jabbed with needles,” she said meekly.

  “Many people do.” Gold’s chuckle would have deceived most listeners. “My own nurse-would you believe it, I’ve got to give her a tranquilizer before I can take a blood sample. I think you’re very good about it, Linda.”

  “But if the other tests were normal-”

  “My dear, that was just a routine physical. There are rare diseases and deficiencies that require specific analysis. I may have missed something.”

  “Such as what?”

  She didn’t look at the doctor; she looked at Michael, now only a few feet away. And she knew.

  “My dear child, I can’t possibly speculate. It could be anything from an allergy to a chemical deficiency. Perhaps you can give me the clue-something you ate or drank, something you did today… Come along, now, you ought to be in bed; we’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

  The pressure of his arm increased and Linda went with it, no long
er resisting. She had found out what she needed to know. During Gold’s final speech, Michael’s eyes had met hers. There must be some truth to this business of ESP, she thought. She had asked, silently; and he had answered, in equal silence.

  As she went through the doorway, Michael seemed far away from her. She was tired; so tired she could hardly move her feet. The doctor’s strong arm half lifted her up the stairs. As she went, through the thickening mists of sleep, she heard Gordon speak his guest’s name, and knew that they would be settling down for a long talk as soon as Andrea left. The pill, the damned sleeping pill; she wouldn’t be able to creep downstairs to listen, as she had listened to other conversations. But it didn’t matter. She knew what they would say as well as if she were in the room, invisible and percipient.

  II

  “Thanks, yes,” Michael said. “I could use a drink.”

  Gordon nodded and went to the bar, which was concealed in what had been a Hepplewhite sideboard. Glancing around the room, in the mental equivalent of a man brushing himself off after a crawl through the woods, Michael reorganized his shaken faculties. The secretary, Briggs, wasn’t in the room; that was why Gordon was doing his own bartending. Come to think of it, Briggs had not reappeared after fetching the doctor. The man must have some idea of tact after all.

  Andrea was still very much with them, though, and Michael wondered how Gordon planned to get rid of the old woman. The man’s need to talk crackled in the air like electricity, but Michael thought he would not bare his soul in front of the witch. Witch…It wasn’t so hard to believe, seeing Andrea as she looked now. Excitement and the damp night air had loosened her frizzled hair so that it hung in limp locks across her cheeks. Witch locks…another appropriate word whose meaning he had never considered.

  “One for the road, Andrea?” Gordon spoke without turning from the bar.

  “Subtle as a brick wall,” the old woman cackled. “Forget it, Gordon, I can take a hint without being primed like a pump. I’m going.”

  She heaved herself up from the couch in a mammoth flutter of skirts and jangle of beads. She was too good an actress, Michael thought, to leave without a good exit line. Gordon seemed to feel the same way; he turned with a glass in each hand and stood watching Andrea. Andrea did not disappoint them. Drawing herself up to her full height, she thrust out an arm and pointed a fat finger at Gordon.

  “You jeered at me tonight, Gordon Randolph, for fighting the powers of darkness. Take care-for They are not mocked. The time may come when you will beg on your knees for the help you despise now. Be sure that I will not deny you.”

  She spun on her heel, her skirts belling out like a monstrous purple flower, and stalked toward the door. Michael arranged his facial muscles into a conciliatory smile, but Andrea was not disarmed. She had a parting word for him, too.

  “As for you-you are a mocker and a doubter…”

  An uncanny transformation came over voice and face, as the first trailed off into silence and the other lost its rigid anger. The old woman’s throat worked hideously as she struggled to speak. When the words finally came, they were shocking because of their softness-faint and whispering, like a child’s voice calling out in the terror of a nightmare.

  “Help,” Andrea said. “Please…help…”

  Too amazed to move, Michael stood rooted, staring at her, and in another second the act was over. The wrinkled face snapped back into its malevolent expression and Andrea stamped out of the room, leaving a silence that vibrated.

  “Whew,” Michael said feebly. “She’s really something, isn’t she?”

  Gordon removed himself from the sideboard, against which he had been leaning, and sauntered toward Michael, holding out one of the glasses. The incident, which had shaken Michael, seemed to have removed some of Gordon’s tension. He was clearly amused.

  “Sit down and have a drink, in that order. That’s what I love about Andrea. She always provides me with an excuse to have another drink.”

  Michael laughed and followed his host’s suggestions.

  “How does she get home?” he asked.

  He was about to add the obvious witticism, but there was no need; his eyes met Gordon’s and they both grinned.

  “Not by broomstick,” Gordon said. “Believe it or not. No, she walks everywhere she goes; the old bitch is as tough as they come. I’d have ordered the car out for her if I hadn’t known, from past experience, that she’d refuse it. With commentary.”

  “That I can believe. Why does she dislike you so much?”

  “I can think of about ten good reasons,” Gordon said promptly. “Six pathological, three socioeconomic, and one-well, maybe it’s psychotic too.” He tilted his head back and finished his drink in one long swallow, rising as soon as it was gone. “Another?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Michael contemplated his barely touched glass with some constraint. It was coming now; and he couldn’t refuse to listen. Just as one human being to another, he owed Gordon that much. And as a potential biographer…Maybe the best thing he could do for Gordon was get him started talking.

  “She hates you because of Mrs. Randolph.”

  “Why not call her Linda?” Gordon came back to the couch and sat down. “You’re a perceptive young man, aren’t you?”

  “It doesn’t require much perception to see that.”

  “No, you’re right. It sticks out like a sore thumb.” Gordon’s shoulders relaxed as if an invisible burden had been lifted from them. The glance he gave Michael was a compound of apology and relief. “Sorry I said that.”

  “I’m not looking for juicy tidbits for a best seller.”

  “I know. Thanks.”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, and then Gordon sat up straighter.

  “Okay. Professionally or otherwise it’s damned good of you to listen to this. Frankly, I’m at my wits’ end. I don’t know what to do-and this is one thing I must do right.”

  “I understand.”

  “I think you do. You see,” Gordon said, staring down at his glass, “I love her.” He gave a queer, smothered laugh. “The oldest, tritest cliché in the language. From a writer, at that, a man who’s supposed to know something about words. But that’s it. That’s what it comes down to, when you strip away all the verbiage. I love her and I won’t let her go.” “Go?”

  “Not physically. Although she has tried…I mean retreat, withdraw into some dark world of her own. That’s what she’s trying to do.”

  “Neurotic? Or psychotic?”

  “Words, words, words,” Gordon snapped; his suave courtesy had left him, and Michael liked him all the better for it. “A psychiatrist can think up labels. I can’t. But I know, better than anyone else can. She’s pulling away, moving back; and now the world she’s invented is becoming real, for her. She-sees things.”

  “Interesting,” Michael said carefully. “How that phrase, which has a perfectly matter-of-fact meaning, can suggest so much that isn’t at all matter-of-fact. I gather you mean she has hallucinations?”

  Gordon’s swift glance at his guest was not friendly; but Michael returned it equably, and after a moment the queer empathy between the two men had reestablished itself. Gordon laughed suddenly and leaned back, putting his glass down on the table.

  “Thanks again. That’s my greatest danger, I guess-becoming mystical myself. We all do, when catastrophe strikes. What has brought this curse upon me?-that kind of thinking. And it is, to say the least, nonconstructive. Yes, she has hallucinations.”

  Michael nodded silently. He was afflicted with an unusual constriction of the brain. Three words. That was all she had said-groaned, rather-just before she slid through his fumbling hands in a genuine faint. But those words, coupled with the similar incident in the grove earlier that day, had told him enough. He was on the verge of repeating his knowledge to Gordon when something made him hesitate. After a moment, Gordon went on,

  “The hallucinations are only part of the problem, but to me-and to Hank Gold, wh
om I’ve consulted-they seem a particularly alarming symptom. It seems to be an animal of some kind that she fancies she sees-a dog, perhaps. Why it should throw her into such a frantic state…”

  The black dog.

  The words formed themselves in Michael’s mind so clearly that for a moment he thought he had spoken them aloud. He did not; nor did he stop to analyze the reasons for his continued silence on this point. Instead, he said, “It seems to be an animal? Don’t you know?”

  Gordon laughed again; this time the sound made Michael wince.

  “No, I don’t know. Don’t you understand? Whatever her fear is, I’m part of it. I’m the one she hates, Mike.”

  It all came out, then, like a flood from behind a broken dam. Michael sensed that this had been building up for a long time, with no outlet. Now he was the outlet. He listened in silence. Comment would have been unnecessary.

  “Linda was barely twenty-one when I met her,” Gordon said. “She was a student, taking the course I taught that one year-you know about that, I suppose. It was an experiment; I thought perhaps teaching might give me something I had failed to find in other pursuits. It didn’t. But it gave me something that meant more.

  “She was beautiful. She never knew, nor did any of the clods around her, how beautiful she really was. You can see it still, though it’s contaminated now, faded. What you may not realize is that she was also one of the most brilliant human beings…Oh, hell, that’s the wrong word; why can’t I find the right words when I talk about Linda? Intelligent-yes, surely. Original, creative, one of those rare minds that sees through a problem to its essentials, whether the problem is social, arithmetical, or moral. But there’s an additional quality… Wisdom? Maybe that gives you a clue, even if it’s not quite right. The quality of love. You know how I mean the word-‘And the greatest of these…’I know, I’m making her sound like a saint. She wasn’t. She was still young, crude in some ways, impatient in others, but that quality was there, ready to be developed, drawing…