The Dark on the Other Side Read online

  “It drew me. God, how it drew me! I couldn’t sleep nights. I sat around waiting for that damned class to meet, three days a week, so that I could see her. I had every adolescent symptom you’ve ever heard of, including humility. It took me four months to realize that I didn’t have to wait for class, or skulk around the library and the coffee shop, hoping for a glimpse of her… You aren’t laughing. I wouldn’t blame you if you did. I mean, I wasn’t precisely the greatest lover that ever lived, but I’d had some experience; there’s not another woman alive or dead that I’d have dithered over for four months before I got up nerve enough to ask her to have dinner with me.

  “After that,” Gordon said softly, “it went quickly. We were married six weeks later.”

  He relapsed into silence, staring dreamily at the fire. Michael said nothing. He knew there was more to come.

  “Linda’s background,” Gordon said suddenly. “I suppose, if you follow the current theories, that it accounts for what is happening to her now. I can’t see it myself. Maybe I’m too close.

  “Her father was a policeman, just an ordinary run-of-the-mill cop on the beat. He was killed in a gunfight when she was thirteen, shot dead on the spot by a nervous burglar he was trying to arrest. Posthumous medal, citation-and a collection taken up by the appreciative citizens which kept the widow and three orphans eating for about six months.

  “It seems fairly clear that her father was the only member of the family with whom Linda had any emotional ties, so his death hit even harder than it would ordinarily hit a girl of that age. Her mother I’ve never met; she remarried and moved to some damned hole like Saskatchewan when Linda was sixteen. Linda refused to invite her to the wedding; she showed me the letter her mother wrote when she read of our engagement in the newspapers. It was fairly sickening, full of effusions about how well her baby had done for her little self, and suggestions as to how she could share the wealth with the rest of the family. Linda threw it in the fire. She must have written her mother; an absence of response wouldn’t be enough to choke off that sort of greedy stupidity. Whatever she said, it was effective. We haven’t heard from the mother-in-law since, nor from the two brothers. One is a merchant seaman, the other is in one of the trades out west-carpenter, plumber, I don’t know what.

  “That’s what makes the phenomenon of Linda so hard to believe-that she could have emerged from that mess of normal, grubby people. Her father must have been an unusual person. Or else she’s a throwback to something in the remote family past…you never know. She’s always refused to let me look up her genealogy. Not that it matters, of course, but I was curious, strictly from a scientific point of view.

  “So, she loved her father and hated her mother; nice, straightforward Oedipus complex. And she married me because I was a good father figure, older, successful, supportive. Christ, Mike, you don’t need to nod at me; I know all this, I’ve been over it, to myself and with professionals, a dozen times. But the reason why psychiatry fails to satisfy me is because it invents its own data. You act in a particular way because you hate your father. You admit you hate him-fine and dandy. You say you don’t hate him, you really love him? You’re kidding yourself, buddy, because I know better; you wouldn’t be acting this way if you loved him. You hate him. But, in a way, you love him, too, because of that thing called ambivalence. What good is that sort of thing to me, Mike? It gives too many answers.”

  He waited. This time he wanted a response.

  Michael didn’t know what to say. He never did know, when people talked this way. What do you say to a man who has cut his heart out and put it on the table in front of you? “Nice, well-shaped specimen. There seems to be a hole in it, right here…”

  “It doesn’t give simple answers,” he said carefully.

  “The question is simple.”

  “Is it really?”

  “Why does my wife hate me?”

  Michael made an impatient movement.

  “Any question can be stated in simple terms. ‘Why do men fight wars?’ ‘If we can send a man to the moon, why can’t we solve the problem of poverty?’ ‘God is good; how can He permit evil?’ That sort of simplicity is a semantic trick. You don’t alter the complex structure of the problem by reducing it to basic English.”

  Gordon did not reply, and for some minutes the two men sat in silence, listening to the hiss of the dying fire. That sound, and Gordon’s soft breathing, were the only sounds in the room. Michael realized that it must be very late. He was conscious of a deep fatigue-the sodden, futile exhaustion that resulted from wallowing in other people’s emotional troubles. Too much god-damned empathy, he thought sourly. He thought also of the comfortable guest room upstairs, with its nice, soft mattress and its well-placed reading light. But he couldn’t leave, not while Gordon wanted an audience. And there was something else that had to be said.

  “Gordon.”

  “Hmmm?” Gordon stirred; he looked as if he had come back from a great distance.

  “I’m wondering. Whether I should go ahead with this project.”

  “What do you mean?” The confessional was closed; Gordon’s dark eyes were searching.

  “Probing the emotional problems of a man who’s been dead for a century is one thing. Obviously I can’t lacerate your private emotions in that way. And I’m not sure that I can do anything worthwhile with your life without considering them, not any longer.”

  “I wondered too. Whether you’d say that.”

  Gordon stood up, stretching like a big cat. Michael noted the smooth play of muscle and the lean lines of his body, and a fleeting thought ran through his mind: I’d hate to tangle with him, even if he is forty.

  “Another drink?” Gordon asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  “I’ll bet you’re beat. You can go to bed in a minute, Mike. I appreciate all this… But first I want to make a confession, and a request.”

  “You want me to go ahead with the biography.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the confession?”

  “I hate to admit it, it’s so childish.” Gordon didn’t look embarrassed; hands in his pockets, he stood gazing down at Michael with a faint smile. “But you are a perceptive devil, Mike. I wasn’t aware of this, consciously; but I guess one of the reasons why I allowed this project to get underway was that I hoped you might come up with some burst of insight into my problem. Something I can’t see because I’m too close to it.”

  “Something the best professionals can’t see either?”

  “I told you my misgivings about psychiatry. And even if the head shrinkers could help, Linda won’t let them. She’s refused even to see a neurologist.”

  “You overwhelm me,” Michael said helplessly. He meant it literally; he felt as if Randolph had just dumped a load of bricks on him. He was flattened and breathless under the heap of responsibility. He was also annoyed. It was too much to ask of any man, much less a poor feeble writer.

  “No, no, don’t feel that way. I don’t expect a thing. I just…hope. Look, Mike, I understand your scruples and your doubts, completely. Try it. Just try it. Work on the book for a couple of weeks, a month, see how it goes. Then we’ll talk again.”

  “Okay.”

  Michael stood up. He felt stiff and queasy and in no mood to argue.

  “We’ll leave it that way,” he said. “Damn it, Gordon, I can’t help but feel that you’re exaggerating. Your wife doesn’t hate you.”

  “No?” They faced one another across the hearthrug. Gordon, hands still in his pockets, rocked gently back and forth as if limbering up for a fight. His eyes were brilliant. “Six months ago she tried to kill me.”

  III

  Rain fell, heavily enough to keep the windshield wipers busy and make the oily surface of the highway dangerously slick. The weekend drivers were pouring back into the city. Michael had to pay close attention to his driving. A long night’s sleep had left him oddly unrefreshed; he had started out tired, and two hours on one of the nation’s most ex
pensive death traps didn’t exactly help. By the time he reached his apartment he could barely drag himself upstairs. There were four flights of stairs. The old building had no elevator.

  After the Randolph mansion, his two rooms and kitchenette should have looked grubby and plebeian, but Michael heaved an involuntary sigh of pleasure at the sight of his worn rugs and tattered upholstery. His desk was overflowing with unfinished work. He had left the dishes in the sink. Even so, the place felt warm and cozy compared to the atmosphere of the big handsome house in the country.

  He selected two cans, more or less at random, from the collection on the kitchen shelves, and started to heat up the contents. Napoleon had been and gone; his dish on the floor was empty, but he was nowhere in sight. The kitchen window was open its usual three inches. It still amazed Michael that a cat the size of Napoleon, the scarred, muscled terror of the alleys, could get through an opening that narrow, but he had seen him do it often enough, sometimes with the speed and accuracy of a rocket.

  Once he had tried shutting Napoleon in the apartment while he was away for the weekend. Napoleon had expressed his opinion of that with his usual economy of effort; he had left neat piles of the said opinions every few feet down the hall, through the living room, culminating, in the most impressive pile of all, in the center of Michael’s unmade bed. Michael hadn’t even bothered to speak to him about it. He was only grateful to Napoleon for skipping his desk. After that he left the window slightly open and took his chances with burglars. A closed window wouldn’t deter anyone who really wanted to get in. There wasn’t anything in the place worth stealing anyhow.

  When the soup was hot, he carried the pan into the living room and sat down, putting his feet up on the coffee table, which bore the marks of other such moments of relaxation. He ate out of the pan, remembering, with a wry smile, the smooth, unobtrusive service of the breakfast he had eaten that morning, complete with butler and antique silver chafing dishes. Then his smile faded into an even wrier frown, as the thoughts he had successfully avoided all day forced their way into his consciousness.

  Gordon Randolph had excelled at half a dozen different careers. Michael wondered why he had never gone on the stage. He had an actor’s instinct for a good, punchy line of dialogue.

  Then Michael shook his head, as his habitual sense of fairness reproached him. Gordon didn’t have to dramatize the situation. It was theatrical enough. And he, Michael, had provoked that simple, shocking punch line. He had more or less set it up. Nobody could resist a line like that one.

  “Six months ago she tried to kill me.”

  The man has guts, Michael thought. He’s still there-not only in the same house, but right in the next room.

  Gordon’s description of that incredible event hadn’t been theatrical at all; if anything, it had been understated. But Michael’s writer’s imagination had not required any details. He could picture it only too vividly: to wake from a sound sleep to see, standing over you, a figure out of a nightmare-or out of a Greek tragedy, a figure with the terrifying beauty and malignancy of Medea, arm upraised, knife poised to strike-and to know that the would-be killer was your own adored wife… No wonder primitive people had believed in demoniacal possession.

  Because he had the muscles of an athlete and the quickness of a cat, Randolph had survived the encounter, but he still bore the mark of it, a long, puckered scar along his forearm. Michael’s insistent imagination presented him with another picture that was even worse than the first. To wrestle for your very life with some Thing that had the cunning and strength of the insane, and yet the familiar soft body of the woman you loved; held back by fear of hurting the beloved, but knowing that if you failed to hold her, the Other would have your life. Demoniac possession? God, yes, surely that was how you would think of it, despite the centuries of rational skepticism that had supposedly killed that superstition.

  The soup on the bottom of the pan was scorched. Michael’s food always was; he cooked everything at top heat. He ate absently, without noticing the taste. There was a bad taste in his mouth anyhow. That house-that sick, evil house…

  He paused, the spoon dripping unnoticed onto his knee, as his mind grappled with this new and absorbing notion. Evil. Now why had he thought of that word? It was a concept he avoided because it was at once too simple and too complex-meaningless, he would have said once. And yet, during that whole weekend, the word had come up again and again. They had all used it, talked about it.

  A thud and then a clatter came from the dark kitchen, and Michael jumped and swore as he noticed the puddle of soup on his trouser leg. He put the spoon back into the pan and swabbed ineffectually at the spot with his hand. That only made it worse. Then he looked up, glaring, as the pad of heavy paws announced the arrival of Napoleon.

  The cat stood in the doorway, returning Michael’s glare with interest. He was an enormous animal, as big as a small dog, and uglier than any dog Michael had ever met. His ancestry must have included cats of every color, for his fur was a hideous blend of every hue permitted to felines-orange, black, brown, white, gray, yellow, in incoherent patches. Now he looked leprous, having lost a good deal of fur in his encounters with other tomcats. One ear was pretty well gone, and a scar on one side of his whiskered countenance had fixed his jaws into a permanent maniacal grin. From the glow in his yellow eyes, Michael deduced that he had just returned from another victory. After a moment, Napoleon nodded to himself, sat down, lifted his back leg into an impossible position, and began licking his flank.

  “Don’t bleed on the rug,” Michael said automatically.

  Napoleon looked up from his first aid, gave Michael a contemptuous stare, and returned to his labors. Michael returned to his thoughts, which were considerably less pleasant than Napoleon’s.

  Homicidal mania. They didn’t call it that nowadays, did they? Paranoia? Schizophrenia? He shook his head disgustedly. Gordon was right: words, words, words. They meant nothing to a man whose wife had tried to kill him.

  Evil. Another word, but it was a word rooted deep in human experience; it satisfied the demand for understanding more than did the artificial composites of a new discipline. It had the solid backing of centuries of emotional connotations. It brought back references from every literary source from Holy Writ to Fu Manchu. Out of this accumulation of literary and racial memory, one quotation came to Michael’s mind:

  By the pricking of my thumbs,

  Something evil this way comes.

  Nobody ever expressed an idea quite as aptly as Shakespeare. But in this case the evil was not approaching. It was already there-in that house.

  Napoleon finished his ablutions and stalked over to lean heavily on Michael’s leg. It was his only means of expressing an emotion, which Michael, in his softer moments, liked to interpret as affection. Someone had once said of that hard-bitten monarch, Henry VII, that he was not, to put it mildly, uxorious. In the same vein of irony one might say of Napoleon that he was not a lap cat. He did lean, occasionally, and his weight being what it was, the effect was noticeable. Michael got up with a weary sigh and extracted a can of cat food from the supply on the shelf. Affection? Gluttony, rather. Napoleon applied himself to supper with uncouth gulps, and Michael wandered back to the couch.

  Not even the cat, for whom he felt a sneaking fondness compounded with envy, could distract him from the black current of his thoughts. How the hell could he write a biography of a man who was as hag-ridden as Gordon Randolph without tearing the man’s soul to bloody shreds? Especially if he went on in this vein of half-baked mysticism. Evil deeds, evil men, he had said-but Evil, in the abstract? If there was evil in the beautiful house, it had to emanate from some living individual.

  There weren’t that many candidates. The revolting old woman, Andrea, was one of them; she was a constant visitor, and she was crazy as a loon. Michael wondered how genuine her belief in witchcraft was. Ninety-nine percent, he thought. What other hang-ups did she have? Certainly the old woman’s blend of malice and supe
rstition was not a healthy influence; but how profoundly had it really affected Linda Randolph? Had Andrea implanted her own insane ideas, or merely strengthened neuroses that had already begun to form? Even insanity has its own brand of logic. The paranoid schizophrenic may kill a complete stranger, suddenly and seemingly without cause; but in terms of the murderer’s delusion, his action makes perfectly good sense. As the object of a widespread conspiracy aimed at his life and reason, he is only acting in self-defense when he kills one of the conspirators. Was that why Linda had attacked her husband? Could such a delusion have been planted by a third party-such as Andrea?

  Then there was Briggs, the fat little man who looked like a moribund pig. Physiognomy was not a science. Under his pale, pudgy façade, Briggs might have the soul of a saint. But Michael doubted it. Briggs’s feelings toward the Randolphs were obvious. He idolized his employer and resented-because he desired-his employer’s wife. Which was natural. Randolph had been modestly vague about the circumstances that had brought Briggs to his present post, but Michael had got the impression of persecution, a miscarriage of justice, the loss of a profession for which the man had prepared all his life. Briggs wasn’t the type to square his shoulders and march back out into the arena after someone had kicked him where it hurt. Randolph ’s offer of a job might, literally, have saved his life. No wonder the little man admired his boss. His attitude toward Linda was equally comprehensible, if less attractive. Malice-plenty of it. Michael wondered whether Gordon was too damned high-minded to see how his secretary felt about his beautiful wife. But Briggs’s brand of feeble frustration was not evil, not in the sense Michael meant.