Black Curtain (14 page)

Maybe, he wondered to himself, they wouldn't be too sorry.

She pointed to a dimly discernible asphalted cutoff a short distance behind them. "That's the way I go in. Hurry up, let's get away from here before we're seen. We've still got a long walk ahead of us."

He couldn't help looking back in that direction, lingeringly. So that was the way in to murder. There was a white signboard swaying mid-center over it, strung from some invisible support. He imagined it would read: PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO THOROUGHFARE.

They crossed over but kept on along the roadside for a considerable distance, Indian file, she in the lead. "There's a much shorter way than this," she explained, "along a path that leads over to the shack from the house itself, but I don't want to bring you that near if I can help it. If they only 1ust got back ahead of us, they might still be up, and one of them might see you from the windows."

The main driveway had long been just a memory behind them, and still she kept going ahead of him. If it was equal in depth to its parallel length along the highway, it was some private estate! A young county.

She stopped finally. "There's their boundary marker. See it up ahead there? That white circle painted around the trunk of the tree. We'll cut in through here now. There's just a short stretch before us where we'll have to feel our way through the rough, and then that inside path that I spoke about makes a sharp turn over and we can get onto that and follow it the rest of the way."

He went first now, to guard her from the occasional intrusive bushes or uncertain footing, while she back-seat drove him from across his shoulder to keep him going in the right direction.

"How is it they don't have the estate fenced in?" he asked. "Leave it open like this for anyone to trespass--"

"Too tight-fisted, I guess. They've owned it since the days of Peter Stuyvesant or somebody. You know these old families they don't live much better than my sister does on Watt Street. Wouldn't spend a red cent for improvement or upkeep if it killed them! Maybe the old man would, if he could tell what he wanted."

After another few minutes they came unexpectedly out onto a little dirt lane, untended and barely visible beneath a patina of leaves and twigs. "Now the rest is all velvet from here on," she promised.

The path dawdled past a two-story building, a disused caretaker's lodge, the lower story of roughedged boulders cemented together, the upper one of logs, with a sloping roof. The windows were all glassless, and the door opened flush with the ground. They stopped in front of it.

"Give me a match, Danny. I left a candle on the floor right inside the door when I was out here this afternoon."

"Got it?"

"Come in and close the door first."

Darkness smothered them like a feather bolster. Then a little-rayed star of matchlight twinkled between her fingers, widened into a candle flame, thrust out wavering tentacles, and sketched in the room for them in dusky-yellow line wash. It occupied the entire ground space of the building, and the candle gleam couldn't get into the corners.

"How do you get up?" He could see the black patch of an open trap over at one end of the ceiling.

"You don't. There used to be a ladder up through that, but somebody must have taken it away. This thing's older than the devil. I'm not sure that the flooring up there would hold anyone any more. You'll have to stay down here, Danny."

"How about the windows?"

"I took care of them as best I could. The ones facing toward the main house, I tacked green felt over them, from a broken-down billiard table I found down in the cellar. The ones in back I had to leave the way they were. You're not in direct sight of the house from here anyway, but the thing to watch out for is someone prowling around in the open over that way and catching a chink of light from here. I've been busy here all week long, smuggling things out underneath the old man in the chair." She smiled a little. "Sometimes he sat six inches higher in it than he usually does, butluckily no one seemed to notice. I've been wheeling him out here for an hour or two every day and reading to him. But as long as he's out of their sight, they wouldn't give a damn where I took him. That's as much as they care about him."

She motioned to a double layer of blankets spread over a foundation of flour and potato sacking, flat on the floor. "That was the best I could do for you along those lines, Danny. I gave you the blanket from my own bed. I would have given you the mattress from it, too, but it was too bulky to lug over here without being seen."

He took her in his arms. They stood there together, silent. He found no words to say but she seemed content.

"I'd better be getting back now," she said.

"Can you get in or will you have to wake them?"

"I've got my own latchkey."

"Hadn't I better go part of the way back with you? That lane out there looked darned lonely just now."

"After all the trouble I just went to to get you safely in here without being seen? I guess not! I'll be all right, there's never anyone around out this way. Kill the candle, until you're ready to close the door again."

He went outside a few steps with her. "When will I see you again?"

"I wheel him out for air about eleven every morning. I'll slip over then."

"Don't take any more chances than you have to." He watched her out of sight down the path until the gloom had blotted her out. Then he turned and went in and closed the door after him.

The candle relighted, he looked around the eerie, twilit place. He took off his coat and rolled it up for a pillow. He smiled grimly. "Home is the slayer," he parodied softly, "home from the sea."

18

His sensation, on waking up, was that of opening his eyes inside a grotto. All blue dimness. His bones ached from the plank floor and his neck felt as if it had a permanent kink. He unrolled his pillow and put his arms through its sleeves. Then he took down the green felt patches from the windows; she'd only used thumbtacks. Somebody might see them from the outside and think it strange.

There was no running water in the place and he had to go out and find some. It was a sort of arbored meadow out there, with plenty of big open saucers between the trees brimming with hot sun. A couple of white butterflies were chasing each other around, supplying the only bit of motion as far as the eye could see. The main house was well out of sight.

He finally saw what he'd been looking for. It wasn't much of a stream, not much thicker than a rope, but the water was clear and cold. He washed his face and drank some of it out of his cupped hands. Then he filled up an empty can with it for his coffee.

Ruth seemed to have thought of everything else. Over in the pantry of the main house they must have thought there were spooks about, the way things must have disappeared. Coffee, tinned milk, bacon, beans, even a container of sugar. There was a cobbled fireplace at one end of the room and he got a little twig-and-straw fire going in that, kept the embers alive long enough afterwards.to heat his coffee over them. He was afraid to use large pieces of wood lest the smoke coming from the chimney betray him.

He was shaving by the touch system, over a tin can of slightly warm water, and with the detachable razor holder he'd brought out in his breast pocket from Tillary Street, when he caught an intermittent rustling sound, like something slithering over the ground in the stillness outside.

He jumped over to the door and crouched, peering out through the crack. It was only the rubbertired wheels of an invalid chair Ruth was pushing up the path.

He stepped out and stared. In it sat an inert thing shaped in the likeness of the human form that might have been cleverly molded pink dough. The only things alive about it were its eyes. There was such a contrast between them and the body they were set in that for a moment Townsend received an illusory impression she was only wheeling two detached eyes, like car headlights, suspended at a height over the seat of the chair.

They gazed at one another in tense silence, the blueprint of a human being and the finished architect's design.

She said, with that slightly monotonous intonation used toward children, or the helpless, or the mute, "See? Look who's here, see? Here's your old friend back again? Are you glad to see him?"

It didn't seem those eyes could get any brighter than they already were, but they managed to.

Then she said, in a warmer, more lifelike tone: "How did it go, Danny?"

"Not a hitch, Ruth. You took care of everything."

"I could hardly close my eyes all night, I was so worried."

"Why?"

"To bring you this close. It seems such a scatterbrained chance to take, the more I think about it. You talked me into it down there last week, but-- Why, this is the last place on earth you should be hanging around!"

He smiled quizzically and didn't answer. He was seeing her in her work outfit for the first time. It wasn't actually a uniform, rather the suggestion of one. She had on a dress of some crisp, yellow, starched stuff, and then over it two white strips crossing her bosom grenadier fashion, and a little apron of the same hanging from her waist. It was an improvement, he thought; it took away that untidy look: the tenement girl of Watt Street.

"Ah, he's waiting for you to say hello," she commiserated. She bent forward to look at her charge. "Don't disappoint him, Danny!" she urged plaintively. "Look how he's begging you to! I know what he wants." She laughed, bent forward, struck her own knees. "Don't you remember those swearing sessions you used to go into with him? You'd sort of trot out your whole vocabulary and use it on him, when there was no one around. Not because you were sore or had anything against him, but just in a kind of a lazy, good-natured way. But such language!" She chuckled reminiscently. "It was sort of like a code between the two of you. He actually enjoyed the abuse. I guess it was a kind of reverse way of showing you liked him. Go ahead, say hello to him. I'll clear out until it's over."

She took her hands off the guide bar of the chair, turned and strolled aimlessly aside. The eyes above the chair glinted.

It should have been very funny, but it wasn't. To Townsend it was poignant, almost tragic. He felt helpless, filled with a nameless sorrow.

He dragged down his collar with two fingers, swallowed hard, and began in a halting, labored Voice that picked up fluency as it went along. It was a swell performance.

The old man's eyes were dancing with sheer joy when Ruth returned to the two of them, and Townsend was wiping off his forehead.

"It's wonderful, isn't it, how he likes the sound of swear words?" she murmured.

Afterwards, when they were sitting out there, one on each side of the chair, he remarked suddenly: "Why does he keep blinking like that?"

"The sun must be bothering his eyes." She shifted the chair around a little.

"The sun wasn't near his eyes," he said.

She leaned forward to look. "He's not doing it now, so it must have been that."

Townsend went on smoking for a moment or two, watching the motionless head in silence. "He's at it again," he said presently, in an undertone.

"Maybe -they're- going back on him too now, weakening from overuse." She touched apprehensive fingers to her mouth. "The poor soul, that's all he has left!"

He frowned as she sat back again in her original position. "He stops it whenever he catches you looking at him. He only seems to do it when I'm watching him."

"Maybe he's just trying to show you how happy be is to have you around again. What other way is there for him to show it?"

"He's -not- happy," Townsend insisted. "There's water forming in the corners of his eyes."

"That's right, he's tearing," she agreed. She took a handkerchief from the side pocket of the chair, touched it delicately to both sides of the graven image's nose bridge. "What does he want from you?"

"I don't know," he said helplessly.

"There must be something you've let him down about."

There must be, he thought, there must be, but who could tell him what it was? The only one of the three of them who knew couldn't speak.

She apologized for her continuing concern. Back at the main house, evidently, that would have been thought silly. "I don't like to see him cry. Now stop it, you here, Mr. Emil? It's been a long time since Danny was last with you; he can't be expected to repeat every last thing just as it was before. They get to be like children," she added in a pitying aside. "Did you used to give him things, like jelly beans or cough drops or something, out of your pockets?"

"I can't remember," he said with utter, forlorn truthfulness.

19

A light unexpected tapping at the door, well after dark, threw a short circuit into him. He'd been sitting there quietly smoking into the black fireplace when he heard it, without any warning sound of footfalls to precede it. He palmed the candle out with a flat, downward sweep of his hand, reared from the packing case he'd been sitting on, and stood astride it, tense and silent.

"Dan," the night seemed to breathe outside, "me." Or was that just a trick of the senses? He went over to the door, removed the chair barricade he'd uptilted against it, and put down the short iron crowbar he'd armed himself with.