The Visitors, page 21
“Don’t,” said Uncle George.
Suddenly Steve had a thought. “Hey,” he said. “I’m not supposed to drive alone. How’ll I get home?”
“Go straight home, and if anyone stops you tell ’em I told you to. Tell ’em I was taken sick, and had to leave.”
“O.K.,” said Steve doubtfully. “But I’d sure hate to louse myself up before I even get my license.”
“You won’t,” said Uncle George. “If anyone gives you any trouble, refer him to me.”
The railroad was seldom used, and the station was weatherbeaten and dilapidated. Steve pulled up at the entrance, and stopped the car. “You’re sure there’s a train through here?” he said. “I don’t remember ever seeing one.”
“I’ve already checked,” Uncle George replied. “There’ll be one along in a few minutes.”
“O.K., if you say so.” Steve turned off the ignition, and settled back.
“No need to wait,” said Uncle George, opening his door. “You go on back.”
“I’m in no hurry.”
“I said go back!” snapped Uncle George. “The sooner you get back, the less chance you’ll be arrested.” He got out and slammed the door.
“Yes sir,” said Steve. He started the car and drove off, and looking in the mirror, he saw Uncle George walk slowly around the side of the station.
When he got home he told his parents what had happened, and they were mystified. “I’m afraid it’s what I said last night,” Kathryn said. “I didn’t mean to lash out like that, but I suddenly thought if I saw him around one more minute I’d scream. I really shouldn’t have said it.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” Powell replied. “So long as he left anything here, he’ll be back.” He looked at the cases of liquor Steve had brought in, and said, “By the way, did he pay for that, or did he charge it?”
“I don’t know,” said Steve. “All I know is he paid for the car.”
Powell examined the slip. “It looks as though he paid for this, too,” he said. “Now, what do you know about that?”
“I really feel badly,” Kathryn said. “I wish I’d had a chance to—” She saw the cellar door swing slowly open, and she felt a draft trickle into the room. “Now who unlocked that?” she asked.
“I didn’t,” replied Powell. He watched her go into the kitchen and close and bolt the door. She started to come back into the living room, but something in Steve’s room caught her eye, and she stared at it.
“What’s the matter?” Powell asked.
For a few seconds she didn’t answer, and then she said, “That stain has come back on the wall in there.”
Oh, God, Powell thought, I give up. They’re after us, and sooner or later they’re going to get us. If we’ve got a brain in our heads we’ll clear out now, before something terrible happens. He started to speak, then realized there was nothing he could say, no excuse he could give for the fear that had suddenly struck him. He clasped his hands together and cracked his knuckles. All right, he thought. So be it. Just sweat it out, and see what happens. He had felt this kind of fear only once before, in a typhoon at sea, and he remembered it eventually had a numbing effect, so that you could live with it. You could even behave almost naturally, after a while.
It was more than a week before they heard from Uncle George. Then an air-mail card arrived, bearing the postmark of Guadalupe and a picture of lush, tropical vegetation, and it read:
Got to thinking about private army after talk with young S. Possibilities in Venezuela and Peru; will let you know developments. Feel better already—Merkimer.
Powell turned the postcard over and examined it. “He must be crazy,” he said.
“He’s certainly been acting odd,” Kathryn agreed. “Maybe the—” She stopped, and left the sentence unfinished.
“Well,” said Powell, as he tossed the card on the table, “I’ll be interested to hear how he makes out.”
TWENTY-ONE
Once Steve got his driver’s license, he came home to sleep and that was about all. Day and night, in fair weather and foul, he drove through the surrounding countryside, wallowing in the luxury of being his own master, able to go where he pleased. Kathryn would give him a marketing list in the morning, and he would run any number of errands provided they could be done by car, but aside from that his ties with home and family were severed as neatly as though he had joined the Foreign Legion. Even his looks underwent a change: he wore driver’s sunglasses all day and sometimes at night, his left elbow became deeply tanned from resting on the door, and his hair was windblown and bleached by the sun. In addition, he attained a self-confidence he had never known before, and it showed in the way he carried himself and talked. He was now a man.
One afternoon, on his return from a jaunt to the New Hampshire beaches, he stopped at the local drugstore, more to see what was going on than for anything else. As he had predicted to his father, the local girls available at this time of year were decidedly substandard, but this didn’t bother him because in his present mood his car gave him all the satisfaction a girl could have, and probably a good deal more. He could afford to take his time, and be as choosy as he liked.
He sauntered to the soda fountain, mounted a stool as though it were a motorcycle, then removed his sunglasses and looked around. At the far end of the fountain was a girl he’d seen before but never spoken to, a trim little blonde about his age who always carried a Siamese cat. She wore a boy’s white shirt, and faded blue jeans that had been cut off above the knees to make shorts; her hair was in a ponytail secured by a rubber band, and her neck, as she leaned forward to sip her soda, looked as thin and white as a duck’s. Her cat was curled up in her lap, asleep. Steve ordered a lemon phosphate, and tried to recall with whom he had seen her before.
The girl was aware of his scrutiny, and she kept her eyes focused into the depths of her soda by way of acknowledgment. If Steve had had more experience, he would have realized that this was nothing more than a gambit; if she had been trying to brush him off, she would have looked straight past him as though he weren’t there. After looking at her for a few moments and getting no response, he swung back and inhaled loudly on his lemon phosphate.
The silence, punctuated only by sucking noises, continued for two or three minutes, then the girl put some change on the counter, picked up her cat as though it were a sweater, and started out. As she went past Steve, she said a barely audible “Hi,” and continued out the door. Steve was flabbergasted. He didn’t know what to say except a belated “Hi!” and by that time the girl had disappeared. He gulped the last of his phosphate, spilled some change onto the counter, and left the drugstore, reminding himself to look casual, and not to hurry. His attempt at an offhand stroll was more like a soft-shoe dance, but it got him outside at something less than a dead run. As it turned out, he could have taken his time. The girl had gone a few yards and then stopped, and with her cat draped over one arm was examining the display window of a furniture store. Steve headed for his car, which by coincidence was almost directly behind the girl, and he vaulted into the driver’s seat and said, “Can I take you anywhere?” His voice sounded strange, and almost cracked.
The girl turned, and looked at him. “Oh,” she said, in a small voice. “I didn’t see you come out.”
“Well, I did,” said Steve unnecessarily. “I mean—here I am.”
“Yes.” She smiled. “That’s a nice car. Is it new?”
“Well, it’s a ’58, but it’s new to me. I just got it last week. You want to see how it works?”
She pretended to hesitate. “I have to be home pretty soon,” she said. “It’s almost suppertime.”
Steve glanced professionally at the sky, as though reading the time, and saw there would probably be a good sunset. A cold, pale moon was beginning to rise in the east. “Plenty of time for that,” he said. “We won’t go far.”
“All right, then.” She approached the car tentatively, and he reached across and opened the door. “My name’s Susan Tolliver,” she said.
“Steve Powell here,” he replied, imitating an Englishman he’d seen in a recent movie.
“Yes, I know,” Susan said as she dropped into the seat. “And this is Yul,” she added, as she folded the cat into her lap. “After Yul Brynner—you know, the King of Siam. This is a Siamese cat.”
“Yes,” said Steve. “So I see.” He put the car in gear and started off, only slightly faster than normal. “Where’d you like to go?” he asked.
“I don’t care. Wherever you say.” She leaned back and looked at him, and Steve realized with a flash of panic that maybe This Is It. He’d never had a girl look at him that way before, but from all he’d seen in the movies and television, that was The Look That Leads to Trouble. Well, it had to come some time, he thought. You might as well face it now as later. He wondered what he was going to do, and began to wish he didn’t have to find out, but it was too late to back away, and he had no choice but to go through with it. He’d be the laughingstock of the town if, now that he’d taken a step toward asserting his manhood, he were to chicken out and turn little boy again. The thought flicked across his mind that it was a lot safer and a lot more fun to be a little boy, but a chemical change was taking place in him that forced his mind into the background, and from somewhere a new and muscular man was emerging. I suppose in a few years I’ll laugh at all this, he thought, but right now I wish it were over. I wish what were over? I don’t even know what’s happening. Then he realized she was talking to him, and he said, “What? I’m sorry.”
“I said what’s it like to live in a haunted house? Isn’t it awfully scary?”
Steve shrugged, and smiled an attempt at a James Bond smile. “Sometimes,” he replied.
“Did you ever see any of the ghosts?”
“Once or twice. It’s not so much the seeing them as hearing them. Oh, sometimes there’s blood on the walls, but that doesn’t happen often.”
“Blood? From what?”
“Nobody knows. It’s supposed to mean someone’s going to die.”
“Have you seen it?”
“Occasionally. But so far nothing’s happened.”
Susan was quiet for a while. “You must be very brave,” she said.
Steve smiled his Bond smile again. “It’s all in how you look at it.”
They drove in silence for a while, and then she said, “Where are we going?”
“There’s a cove below the house, where you get a nice view. I thought we might go there.” He reasoned that the cove would be as good a place as any, because there was always the sunken yacht as a conversation piece, and right now he was desperately in need of conversation. The more he became aware of her presence, and of the soft, perfumy smell of her beside him, the more his words tended to clog in his throat, and his earlier suaveness had disappeared in a turmoil of glandular activity. He’d never known a girl to smell quite this way, or to look quite so much as though she’d be good to touch, and his emotions were rioting around in an area for which he couldn’t find anything like the proper words. All he could do was tremble, and try to maintain some semblance of calm.
The cove was in shadow when they arrived, and the moon had begun to glow in the smoky sky. Steve stopped the car, set the brake, and took a deep breath. She remained motionless, looking at the moon and stroking the cat in her lap. “A very lovely sight,” she said.
“There’s a boat sunk down there,” said Steve. “If you look hard, you can see the mast.”
“I heard. And a man drowned, too, didn’t he?”
“Nobody knows. He just disappeared. Want to go down and look?”
“At what?”
“Well—the boat.” Steve had no particular plan in mind; all he wanted was to keep things moving, and see what happened. He couldn’t conceive of reaching across and trying to kiss her now, but maybe, if they were down by the water, or in the tunnel . . . well, he’d just have to let nature take its course. There must be a better way of going about this, but it was all so new that he didn’t know where to begin.
“All right,” said Susan hesitantly. “But I don’t want to see a drowned man, or anything.”
“Don’t worry. Nothing’s going to hurt you.”
“All right then.” Susan picked up the cat and opened the door.
“Does the cat have to come, too?” Steve asked. “Can’t you leave him here?”
“Anywhere I go, Yul goes,” she replied. “He yowls if I leave him alone, even for a second.”
“Great,” said Steve, without enthusiasm.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I mean—it must make it pretty noisy around the house.”
“No, because he sleeps with me and eats with me and even takes a bath with me. Of course he doesn’t get in the water, because cats hate the water, but he sits by the side of the tub and waits for me.”
Steve saw that the conversation was getting slightly sidetracked, so he pointed to the cove and said, “Here’s the path, down this way. Take my arm, so you won’t fall.” He put out an arm and Susan took it, and when she touched him it was as though a small bolt of lightning had shot through him. He had touched girls before, at dancing class or when teasing them in school, but their touch had always been clammy and impersonal, and sometimes a little sweaty. Susan, on the other hand, had a touch that was charged with something wholly different, and although Steve couldn’t define it, he knew that a big door had just opened somewhere. He guided her carefully down the path, trying to sound calm. “My father and I came here one night,” he said. “I want to tell you, it’s pretty tricky at night.”
“At night?” said Susan. “Good grief, why would you do that?”
“We were looking for Uncle George. We thought he might have hurt himself.”
“You mean the old gink who owned the boat? Whatever became of him?”
Again feeling that the conversation was slipping away from him, Steve said, “Anyway, I found a kind of cave down here that might interest you. Would you like to see it?”
“What’s in it?”
“Nothing, but it’s kind of interesting. You don’t see many caves like it around here.” They were at the foot of the path by now, and the shadows were dark and cold. The sky overhead was a slate-blue tinged with pink, and the moon became smaller as it grew brighter. The tunnel entrance was a black gash in the side of the rock. “Right over here,” Steve said. “Take my hand, and I’ll lead you in.”
She let go his arm and grasped the hand he extended, and he squeezed through the entrance and brought her into the darkness. The cat, which had been lying limp across her arm, suddenly stiffened, arched its back with bristling fur, and with a sound like escaping steam dug its claws into her, struggling to escape. Its eyes were large and red, and its needle-toothed mouth was wide. Susan shrieked and clutched at it, but it tore loose, and with a long, moaning yowl streaked out of the tunnel, down the dock, and into the water. Susan followed, screaming and sobbing, and Steve felt himself propelled after her. In a matter of seconds, the cat, the girl, and the boy were struggling in the water at the end of the dock.
Powell and Kathryn had spent the afternoon working on plans for the party. It was to be a costume affair, but without any particular motif; guests had been told to dress in whatever costume was either appealing or convenient, just so long as it wasn’t standard evening wear.
“I know what we’re going to get,” Powell said, when they were discussing it. “We’re going to get fifteen pirates, eight beachcombers, and twenty-seven hula girls.”
“We haven’t asked that many people,” Kathryn replied. “And besides, I know at least a half dozen who’ll break their necks to be different.”
“Like Liz McCratchney?”
“That was the hostess’ fault. She insisted people come as they were when they got the invitation.”
“And who opens their mail naked?”
“Evidently Liz does.”
“Well, I’ll be interested to see what she wears this time.”
“Just remember your back, my love. You can’t do anything strenuous yet.”
“Of that I am more than aware.” He yawned, and then, very carefully, stretched. “It’s better, though,” he said. “Another five years, and it ought to be cured.” He stood up and sniffed. “Did you get new flowers?”
“No, but thanks for reminding me. I’ve got to get some for the party.” She looked at her watch. “Also, it’s time to put the roast in the oven.”
“O.K., then. I’ll get cleaned up.” He went slowly upstairs, sniffing experimentally here and there, and took off his shirt and threw it on the bed. Then he went into the bathroom. The afternoon light was fading, and the shadows had begun to settle around the house, and he was just about to pull on the light over the bathroom mirror when he saw the reflection of Felicity standing behind him. This time he didn’t turn around, but stood still and waited to see if she would move, while his back and neck tingled with little cold needles. She, too, stood still, staring at him in the mirror, and although her eyes were looking straight at him he could read nothing in them; they were blank and expressionless and cold. Finally, when he could stand it no longer, he turned around, and she was gone. He went out into the hall and looked both ways, but there was nothing there, and he was about to return to the bathroom when through a window he saw Steve’s car, parked at the edge of the cove. He looked carefully, but couldn’t see Steve anywhere, and then a sudden fear gripped him, and he ran downstairs.
“What’s the matter?” Kathryn asked, from the kitchen. “Where are you going?”
“To the cove—Steve’s down there!” He ran out across the lawn, and Kathryn followed. When he got to the edge he saw the figures in the water, and he ran down the path, taking off his belt as he went. Steve had hold of the hysterical girl, who had hold of the cat, and Steve was clinging to one of the pilings, unable to lift himself and his burden onto the dock. Powell threw him one end of the belt, and although it didn’t accomplish much it at least gave him something else to hang on to, and when Kathryn arrived she and Powell were able to drag all three wet and shivering characters up onto the boards. It was a few minutes before Steve could explain what had happened, and when he had finished Powell looked at Kathryn.
