The Others, page 12
“I can see that,” said Angelica. “Has this been going on long?”
“No.” There was a small silence.
“I made a mistake,” said Kip, reddening slowly. “It was last week, after her father died. She found him. She phoned me and I went over … she held up all right till the cops and the coroner were all through, and then she let go. She cried. You ever read about people crying buckets, and think it was funny? The front of my shirt was still wet the next morning… . Warm tears down my chest—the damnedest feeling. It was like she was bleeding all over me. And she kept saying that she was twenty-six years old and ugly, and the only one that had ever loved her was her father, and now he was dead.” After a moment Angelica said unsteadily, “What was your mistake?”
“I kissed her.”
“ … Was that all?”
“No,” Kip said. “I told her I loved her—and, God, I
did—… I do____But she took it—the other way.”
The rain began: first a tap, then a hammering at the windows, and then a steady scything sound, hollow from the roof, staccato on the flagstones, and the rushing gurgle in the downspouts.
Kip’s heard turned abruptly. “What was that?”
“What?”
“Sounded like a door closing—in here.”
“I heard it. I thought it was a car door slamming, outside.”
“Maybe,” said Kip doubtfully. He glanced at her, then walked around the dogleg into the hall.
The bathroom door was ajar. It had been closed before.
Kip pulled it open the rest of the way and stepped in. There was a steamy smell in the air and a faint reek of after-shave lotion. The toilet-seat lid was propped against the wall under the medicine cabinet, in a litter of tubes and boxes. Kip’s toothbrush lay in the middle of the floor, its bristles oozing a puddle of red.
He stepped over it, glanced at the moist gritty ring in the bathtub, and opened the door to the bedroom.
The bed was rumpled. There were two brown wads of nylon on the pillow, and a gray dress on the floor, draped over a lump that was probably a pair of shoes. Kip walked past them into the L-shaped room, around the comer that had been cut out to form the kitchenette on the other side.
The living room door was open. Kip went through in time to hear Nancy Liebert say, “Why don’t you go home?”
She was standing by the table, barefoot, with a black cloth bag clutched in one red-knuckled hand. Her shoulder blades were like plucked bony wings. Her slip was wrinkled and hung awry; one brassiere strap was fastened with a safety pin.
She turned to face him, hunched and awkward, with those big greenish eyes staring feverishly. “Hello, Kip,” she said. “Don’t you think she ought to go home?”
Nancy’s hair was red: not carrot-color and not henna-color, but the real, dark, glossy red that you see once in a lifetime. She had the pale skin that goes with it, and that made it worse. Her thin face was scarred and blotched and lumped with acne. It looked like something that ought to have been covered up. Her eyes didn’t belong in that face, or in any face; they were too large and too bright, and the whites had the yellowish tint of discolored teeth.
Kip said, “Nancy, will you do me a favor?”
“She ought to go home. It isn’t right for her to be here, Kip.”
“We’ll talk about that afterward,” said Kip. His hands were curling involuntarily. “First the favor, huh?”
“Well, what is it?”
“Go put your dress on. Please.”
She thought about it. “Well,” she said confidentially, “if she won’t go, we’ll just have to pretend she isn’t here.” She marched past Kip into the bedroom. After a moment they heard the springs creak as she sat down.
“What are you going to do?” Angelica murmured.
He sat beside her, trying to unwind the tension. “Take her home.”
“Kip, that girl ought to be in a psychiatric ward.”
“I know it. George wanted her to get help years ago, but her mother wouldn’t hold still for it. Took it as a personal insult. I can’t get her into a hospital; it needs a relative.”
“Call the police. Have her arrested for malicious mischief. I know how it sounds, but it’s the best thing you can do for her.”
Nancy walked out of the kitchenette, wearing the gray dress, unbuttoned, and one stocking. She was still carrying the black bag in one hand; with the other she held up a bottle of prune juice.
“Have some?” she said brightly.
“No, thanks,” said Kip. “Nancy—”
She giggled and walked back out of sight. They heard bottles clinking in the refrigerator, then nothing but the rain.
When the silence alarmed them, a few minutes later, Kip first called to her and then went to look. A window in the bedroom was open, rain whipping in in gusts over the bed and half the floor. Nancy was gone.
The next morning was bad. The alarm rolled him out at 6:30 and Kip sang in the shower, out of habit, before he remembered. Then he wrapped himself in a towel and padded into the living room to make sure. It was true, all right: there were the nail holes in the wall over the couch, there were the faint stubborn smears of red paint that wouldn’t come off, and there was the spot, by the door, where Angelica had said a word to him that would be hard to take back.
He brooded about it while his eggs turned leathery in the pan. After Nancy’s disappearance, they had gone over the business about Kip’s calling the police, with all the logic on Angelica’s side, and nothing at all on Edp’s except the knowledge that he'll! feel like the executioner at Golgotha if he did it without trying all the other ways first.
From that, in some way that wasn’t clear to Kip, they’d got onto the subject of his job. Kip didn’t see anything wrong with it; he’d tried a lot of things since college and had fun at all of them—lumberjack, boy’s-camp counselor, zoo attendant, merchant seaman—but never a one had been as pleasant or congenial as this. He said so. He pointed out in passing that if he’d been doing any other work, he would very likely never have met Angelica. For no apparent reason this seemed to infuriate her.
She was silent long enough to count ten; then her eyes narrowed. “Kip, I just remembered something you said at lunch. Did you study biochemistry in college?”
“Sure. U.C.L.A. George was one of my profs—didn’t I ever tell you?”
“Then, am I wrong in thinking that you did a little more for Professor Liebert than just washing bottles? Were you one of his star pupils, by any chance?”
“Well, he gave me A’s, but-”
“Well, then why-”
“Wait a minute. That was just a kind of a hobby—I wasn’t majoring in it.”
That stopped her for a minute. “What was your major— physical ed?”
“Physics. Nuclear.”
That stopped her again. Her eyes got big and round. “I suppose you got A’s in that, too. Don’t tell me, I know you did. Kip, I’m sorry, this isn’t really my business—but how could you give that up, or even half of it, for this kind of a life?”
He groped for a way to tell her. “It wasn’t like that— not the way you mean it. See, when I was a kid, I was a science nut. Skinny little guy with an armload of books. Well, all through high school and college I kept thinking that was what I wanted to do, but the work was getting tougher and tougher. All right, then I went back for p.g., figuring with the football and track out of the way, I’d really hit it. And I got sick. I didn’t finish the first semester.
“When I got my strength back, I tried it again— summer extension. And I got sick again. Real sick— anemia, hypertension, asthma, every damned thing, and a jolt of cerebrospinal meningitis on top of it. When I came out of that, I sat down and figured it out. All those things are psychosomatic except the meningitis, and by that time I was a sucker for any kind of bug. I was asking for it. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life getting hunchbacked and nearsighted over a lab bench, but I was kidding myself that I did. What for? To make bigger and better bombs?
“So I headed north and spent a season logging. I haven’t been sorry once.”
Angelica’s cheeks were pinker than usual. She said gravely, “And you think that wasn’t giving up anything? What are you going to do when you can’t be a golf pro anymore, Kip?”
“I may not wait that long. I’ve got my eye on a little place up in the sequoia country that Fd like to buy if I can raise the price. A tourist camp, on a lake.”
“A tourist camp!”
“Sure. I know there’s more work in it than most people think—carpentry, plumbing, anything you want to name, but that’s all right. I can do anything that-”
“You can do anything,” said Angelica hurriedly, getting up, “but you won’t.” She picked up her raincoat with one motion, got into it with two more. She had the door open before he could move. She turned.
“Why do they give talent to people like you?” she asked, looking at him as if he had a window in his forehead. And then she was gone….
The scrambled eggs were brown around the edges and a delicate greenish color in the middle. Kip nudged them off onto a plate, added underdone bacon, and carried the mess abstractedly into the living room. Rolls, butter, fruit juice, coffee. The coffee was cold.
He swore at it without enthusiasm and drank the prune juice, which bit him on the way down.
He choked, spraying brown droplets on the already colorful eggs, and stared at the empty glass. “Brandy,” he said aloud, and then, “Nancy.”
That was right: she’d come into the room with the bottle in her hand. She must have laced the stuff with cognac just before that, or else on the way back. Before, probably. Another little joke.
But it didn’t fit. Everything else had followed one plain pattern: the toilet seat, die garbage wedding cake, even the eggshells: love and fear.
What was the symbolic significance of cognac? Of prune juice?
Kip stood up suddenly and walked into the kitchenette. He opened the refrigerator. There was the prune juice bottle, and there, directly above it on the cabinet, was the cognac, but they didn’t tell him anything.
He didn’t understand it and he didn’t like it.
If it came to that, what about Nancy’s exit through the window? That wasn’t pattern, either; he had expected to spend the rest of the evening trying to get her home.
Could she have overheard what they were saying in the living room? Very likely; they’d been keeping their voices down, but there was no telling how long she’d been listening at the bedroom door or just around the corner in the hall.
That reminded him that nobody had answered the phone last night at the apartment Nancy shared with her mother. It was too early yet for anything but a fire or an earthquake; he’d give them till eight, anyhow, before he tried again.
He wandered back into the living room and looked moodily at the wall where Nancy’s inscription was still faintly legible. “LuO + Vi2 + E → i LOVE u2.” That fitted, but not particularly well, unless you took chemistry to mean stinks.
Chemistry.
Question: Why would you put cognac in a bottle of prune juice?
Answer: To hide the taste of something else.
Kip felt a little odd. The room was blurry and there was a ringing in his head—no, not a ringing, a murmur.
Nancy could have got hold of all her father’s keys. She might have found the lab safe combination among his papers.
And George had put a poison label on the …
Kip turned to the table, dipped his finger in the little puddle left in the prune juice glass, and tasted it. Prune. Cognac. And something else, unmistakable now that he was looking for it: the dark oily taste of the vitamin solution.
He whirled and headed for the bathroom. The murmuring was getting louder: tinny little voices, as if a bunch of people were talking quietly at the bottom of a well. Sweating, Kip tried not to hear them, but he couldn’t help it:
“… afraid of being poisoned.”
“Peculiar. Must be cracking up.”
They were talking about him. Was this what had happened to George’s monkeys, to make them froth at the mouth, and bite themselves bloody, and die?
He skidded on the wet floor, grabbed the rim of the washbowl and found himself staring at his own flushed image in the cabinet mirror. For an instant he thought idiotically that someone had painted little malevolent faces on the wall behind him. Then they snapped into focus, and no matter how long he looked, he couldn’t deny what he saw:
Four little men, smoke-blue and as insubstantial as soap bubbles, squatting on his shoulders.
II
Kip sat in the leather chair with his head in his hands, eyes shut, knuckles tight against his temples. There was one repeated thought in his mind: A monkey isn’t a man. He had been thinking it so long and so hard that he wasn’t quite sure what he meant by it anymore, but it was a comforting thing: it was something to hold onto.
Keeping his eyes closed was an improvement, but he could still hear die voices; putting his fingers in his ears, he’d already discovered, didn’t help. The sounds weren’t ordinary physical vibrations, he was sure, although he was certainly hearing them with his ears; they were binaural and he could estimate their sources with exactness; for example, two of them were still on his left shoulder, but the other two were moving—
He sat bolt upright, with a thrill of pure horror.
One of the two abominable little voices was now coming from the general region of his lungs. The other was inside his skull.
There was a knocking on the storeroom door and then a hoarse yell: “Hey, Kip!” That was Lebeau, the caddy master.
He got up stiffly and went to the door without opening it. “Yeah, Irving?”
“Mr. Chase is out here—says you promised to work him out with his irons this morning.”
“Vitamins?” the voice in chest was saying. “What the thunder and blazes are vitamins?”
“You know” said the voice in his head, “those chemical things. Blast it, Alfie, try to be a little more help . . ” “Tell him I’m sorry,” said Kip. “I can’t make it— feeling kind of rocky.”
“Okay. Hey, Kip.”
“Yeah.”
“You know who slopped all this paint around the storeroom?”
“Oh,” said Kip. The two voices inside him were still arguing about vitamins, and now the things on his shoulder had joined in; he could see them out of the comer of his eye. “I did that myself, Irv—I’ll straighten it out with the club.” He hesitated, then opened the door.
Lebeau looked at him, his sad face all lit up with concern and curiosity. “Hey, you do look beat. You better go see a doctor.”
“Think I will. Look, Irv, will you square me with the paying customers and so on? And about the paint—tell Olcutt I’ll talk to him tonight or tomorrow. Okay?”
“Sure, Kip.”
… That settled one point, anyhow; not that he had been in much doubt about it: the little blue people were visible and audible only to him.
Next—Kip went grimly back into the bathroom, sponged the cold sweat off his forehead, and stared at the two little beings who were still visible on his shoulder. One had a long, hatchet-sharp face, the other was pudgy and shapeless. They stared back at him, and it was pretty hard to take.
“Who are you?” he said to the mirror in the empty room.
They blinked at each other. “Think we ought to tell him?” asked the pudgy one. “It seems only polite,” said Hatchet-face. “But—of course—he is not real.”
Kip’s jaw wouldn’t close properly. While he was working on it a blue haze flowed out of him and solidified into the other two creatures, the lantern-jawed one with the bristly moustache and the squat sheep-faced one. “What’s this? What’s this?” said Lantern-jaw.
“Talking to us,” explained the shapeless one. “Wants to know who we are.”
Lantern-jaw looked affronted. “Irregular,” he said.
“Still—why not?” asked Hatchet-face. “I am Don Nobilio Hernandez San Juan Filippe Salvador Guevara de Cervera-Silva. These gentlemen are Captain Ephram Goodnews, Major Jocelyn Britt-Howard, and Doctor Alfred R. O’Leary.”
“Doctor of dentistry,” piped up the sheep-faced one.
“How do you do,” said Kip insanely; and then, “What’s this all about? What are you doing here, what do you want? And what do you mean, Vm not real?”
Lantern-jaw snorted. “My dear fellow,” he said, “we’re dreaming you.”
“You,” asked Kip carefully, “are dreaming me?”
“Absolutely. Nothing odd in that, is there? I’ll admit this is an uncommonly long dream, but that suits me.
When I went to sleep, I don’t mind telling you, I was a damn’ sick man. Damn’ sick.”
“I also,” sighed Hatchet-face. “We are not as young as we used to be.”
“I can use the rest,” said the sheep-faced one. “Have to be pretty careful—my heart, you know.”
“Spar knocked me into the scuppers,” the shapeless one said. “Worst storm I ever saw. Don’t know why we haven’t foundered by now.”
Kip stared at them all in horror. The transparency of Major Britt-Howard’s face was splotched and spotted. In Don Nobilio’s right temple, just over the eye, there was a tiny, puckered hole. And Captain Goodnews, lumpy, swollen—
“What year is it?” he asked hoarsely. “Not in your dream, but the real year?”
All four looked uneasy. “Ought nine,” snapped the Major.
“It is the year of Our Lord eighteen sixty-seven,” said Don Nobilio.
“Nineteen twenty-one,” said Dr. O’Leary.
“Eighty-nine,” said Captain Goodnews.
They glared at each other briefly. “You’re dead,” said Kip. He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t stop. He pointed to the major. “You and Dr. O’Leary died of disease. You”—to Don Nobilio—“were shot in your sleep. And you”—to Captain Goodnews—“drowned.”
There was a babble of furious protest, dominated by Major Britt-Howard’s “Nonsense! Nonsense!” He added, “Knew it was a mistake to talk to the beggar. Argue with a dream, deserve what you get. Come along, Alfie, Ephram, Billy-oh.”
