Black Gondolier and Other Stories (17 page)

Nancy eyed him closely. “What sort of materials? I mean the engulfed fragments.”

He hesitated. “I'm not quite sure,” he said. “The X-ray was . . .oh, such things are apt to be odd, though harmless stuff—teeth, hair, nails, you never can tell. We'll know better later.”

“Could I see the X-ray?”

He hesitated again. “I'm afraid it couldn't mean anything to you. Just a lot of shadows.”

“Could there be . . . other pockets of fragments?”

“It's not likely. And if there are, it's improbable they'll ever bother you.”

There was a pause.

Nancy said, “I don't like it.”

“I don't like it,” she repeated. “It's as if Beth had come back. Inside me.”

“The fragments have no connection with your dead sister,” Dr. Ballard assured her. “They're not part of Beth, but of a third sister, if you can call such fragments a person.”

“But those fragments only began to grow after Beth died. As if Beth's soul . . . and was it my original cell that split a second time?—or was it Beth's?—so that it was the fragments of half her cell that I absorbed, so

that . . .” She stopped. “I'm afraid I'm being silly again.”

He looked at her for a while, then, with the air of someone snapping to attention, quickly nodded.

“But doctor,” she said, also like someone snatching at practicality, “what's to happen now?”

“Well,” he replied, “in order to get rid of this disfigurement to your ankle, a relatively minor operation will be necessary. You see, this sort of foreign body can't be reduced in size by heat or X-ray or injections. Surgery is needed, though probably only under local anaesthetic. Could you arrange to enter a hospital tomorrow? Then I could operate the next morning. You'd have to stay about four days.”

She thought for a moment, then said, “Yes, I think I could manage that.” She looked distastefully at her ankle. “In fact, I'd like to do it as soon as possible.”

“Good. We'll ask Miss Snyder to arrange things.”

When the nurse entered, she said, “Dr. Myers is outside.”

“Tell him I'll be right along,” Dr. Ballard said. “And then I'd like you to call Central Hospital. Miss Sawyer will take the reservation we got for Mrs. Phipps and were about to cancel.” And they discussed details while Nancy pulled on stocking and shoe.

Nancy said goodbye and started for the waiting room, favoring her bad leg. Dr. Ballard watched her. The nurse opened the door. Beyond, Nancy's friend got up with a smile. There was now, besides her, a dark, oldish man in the waiting room.

As the nurse was about to close the door, Dr. Ballard said, “Miss Sawyer.”

She turned. “Yes?”

“If your ankle should start to trouble you tonight—or anything else—please call me.”

“Thank you, doctor, I will.”

Dr. Ballard nodded. Then he called to his friend, “Be right with you.” The dark, oldish man flapped an arm at him.

The door closed. Dr. Ballard went to his desk, took the X-ray photograph out of its brown envelope, switched on the light, and studied the photograph incredulously.

He put it back in its envelope and on the desk. He got his hat and overcoat from the closet. He turned out the light. Then suddenly he went back and got the envelope, stuffed it in his pocket, and went out.

The dinner with Dr. Myers and three other professional friends proved if anything more enjoyable than Dr. Ballard had anticipated. It led to relaxation, gossip, a leisurely evening stroll, a drink together, a few final yarns. At one point Dr. Ballard felt a fleeting impulse to get the X-ray out of his overcoat pocket and show it to them and tell his little yarn about it, but something made him hesitate, and he forgot the idea. He felt very easy in his mind as he drove home about midnight. He even hummed a little. This mood was not disturbed until he saw the face of Miss Willis, his resident secretary.

“What is it?” he asked crisply.

“Miss Nancy Sawyer. She . . .” For once the imperturbable, greying blonde seemed to have difficulty speaking.

“Yes?”

“She called up first about an hour and a half ago.”

“Her ankle had begun to pain her?”

“She didn't say anything about her ankle. She said she was getting a sore throat.”

“What!”

“It seemed unimportant to me, too, though of course I told her I'd inform you when you got in. But she seemed rather frightened, kept complaining of this tightness she felt in her throat . . .”

“Yes? Yes?”

“So I agreed to get in touch with you immediately. She hung up. I called the restaurant, but you'd just left. Then I called Dr. Myers' home, but didn't get any answer. I told the operator to keep trying.

“About a half hour ago Miss Sawyer's friend, a Marge Hudson, called. She said Miss Sawyer had gone to bed and was apparently asleep, but she didn't like the way she was tossing around, as if she were having a particularly bad dream, and especially she didn't like the noises she was making in her throat, as if she were having difficulty breathing. She said she had looked closely at Miss Sawyer's throat as she lay sleeping, and it seemed swollen. I told her I was making every effort to get in touch with you and we left it at that.”

“That wasn't all?”

“No.” Miss Willis' agitation returned. “Just two minutes before you arrived, the phone rang again. At first the line seemed to be dead. I was about to hang up. Then I began to hear a clicking, gargling sound. Low at first, but then it grew louder. Then suddenly it broke free and whooped out in what I think was Miss Sawyer's voice. There were only two words, I think, but I couldn't catch them because they were so loud they stopped the phone. After that, nothing, although I listened and listened and kept saying ‘hello' over and over. But, Dr. Ballard, that gargling sound! It was as if I were listening to someone being strangled, very slowly, very, very . . .”

Dr. Ballard had grabbed his surgical bag and was racing for his car. He drove rather well for a doctor and, tonight, very fast. He was about three blocks from the river when he heard a siren, ahead of him.

Nancy Sawyer's apartment hotel was at the end of a short street terminated by a high concrete curb and metal fence and, directly below, the river. Now there was a fire engine drawn up to the fence and playing a searchlight down over the edge through the faintly misty air. Dr. Ballard could see a couple of figures in shiny black coats beside the searchlight. As he jumped out of his car he could hear shouts and what sounded like the motor of a launch. He hesitated for a moment, then ran into the hotel.

The lobby was empty. There was no one behind the counter. He ran to the open elevator. It was an automatic. He punched the twenty-three button.

On that floor there was one open door in the short corridor. Marge Hudson met him inside it.

“She jumped?”

The girl nodded. “They're hunting for her body. I've been watching. Come on.”

She led him to a dark bedroom. There was a studio couch, its covers disordered, and beside it a phone. River air was pouring in through a large, hinged window, open wide. They went to it and looked down. The circling launch looked like a toy boat. Its searchlight and that from the fire engine roved across the dark water. Shouts and chugging came up faintly.

“How did it happen?” he asked the girl at the window.

“I was watching her as she lay in bed,” Marge Hudson answered without looking around.

“About twenty minutes after I called your home, she seemed to be getting worse. She had more trouble breathing. I tried to wake her, but couldn't. I went to the kitchen to make an ice pack. It took longer than I'd thought. I heard a noise that at first I didn't connect with Nancy. Then I realized that she was strangling. I rushed back. Just then she screamed out horribly. I heard something fall—I think it was the phone—and footsteps and the window opening. When I came in she was standing on the sill in her nightdress, clawing at her throat. Before I could get to her, she jumped.”

“Earlier in the evening she'd complained of a sore throat?”

“Yes. She said, jokingly, that the trouble with her ankle must be spreading to her throat. After she called your home and couldn't get you, she took some aspirin and went to bed.”

Dr. Ballard switched on the lamp by the bed. He pulled the brown envelope from his coat pocket, took out the X-ray and held it up against the light.

“You say she screamed at the end,” he said in a not very steady voice. “Were there any definite words?”

The girl at the window hesitated. “I'm not sure,” she said slowly. “They were suddenly choked off, exactly as if a hand had tightened around her throat. But I think there were two words. ‘Hand' and ‘Beth.'”

Dr. Ballard's gaze flickered toward the mocking face in the photograph on the chest of drawers, then back to the ghostly black and whites of the one in his hands. His arms were shaking.

“They haven't found her yet,” Marge said, still looking down at the river and the circling launch.

Dr. Ballard was staring incredulously at the X-ray, as if by staring he could make what he saw go away. But that was impossible. It was a perfectly defined and unambiguous exposure.

There, in the X-ray's black and greys, he could see the bones of Nancy Sawyer's ankle and, tightly clenched around them, deep under the skin and flesh, the slender bones of a human hand.

SPIDER MANSION

A TREMENDOUS splash of lightning gave us our first glimpse of the pillared front of the Old Orne House—a pale Colonial mask framed by wildly whipping leaves. Then, even before the lightning faded, it was blotted out by a solid sheet of muddy water sloshing up against the windshield.

“But I still don't like midgets,” Helen said for the third time, “and besides— ” Close thunder, like thick metal ripping drowned out the rest.

“It's gotten beyond a question of your or my personal taste in heights,” I argued, squinting for a sight of the road between mud splashes. “Sure Malcolm Orne's a midget, but you don't know how slippery the road is ahead or how deep those Jersey salt marshes are on either side of it. And no garages or even houses for miles. Too risky, in this storm. Anyway, we figured all along we might visit him on the way. That's why we took this road.”

“Yes, this lonely, god-forsaken road.” Helen's voice was as strained and uneasy as her face, pallidly revealed by another lightning flash. “Oh, I know it's silly of me, but I still feel that— ”

Again cracking thunder blanketed her words. Our coupe was progressing by heaves, as if through a gelatinous sea. I spotted the high white posts a little ahead, and swung out for the turn-in.

“Still really want to go on?” I asked.

Maybe it was the third blast of thunder, loudest of the lot, that decided her against further argument. She gave me a “You win” look, and even grinned a little, being a much better sport that I probably deserved for a wife.

The coupe slithered between the posts, lurched around squishily on a sharp slippery rise, made it on the last gasp, and lunged toward the house through a flail of lasting, untrimmed branches.

The windows in front were dark and those to the right were tightly shuttered, but light flickered faintly through the antique white fanlight above the six-paneled Colonial door. Helen hugged my arm tight as we ducked through the drenching rain up onto the huge porch, with its two-story pillars. I reached for the knocker.

Just at that moment there came one of those brief hushes in the storm. The lightning held off, and the wind stopped. I felt Helen jump at the ugly rustling, scraping sound of a branch which, released from the wind's pressure, brushed against a pillar as it swung back into place. I remembered noting that the paint was half-peeled away from the pillar.

Then things happened fast. Groping for the knocker, I felt the door give inward. There was a deafening blast from
inside
the house. A ragged semi-circle of wood disappeared from the jamb about a foot from the ground. Splinters flew from a point in the floor eight inches from my shoe. The door continued to swing slowly open from the first push I had given it, revealing a Negro with grizzled hair and fear-wide eyes, clad in the threadbare black of an out-dated servant's costume. Despite his slouching posture he still topped six feet. Smoke wreathed from the muzzle of the shotgun held loosely in his huge pink-palmed hands.

“Oh, Lordy,” he breathed in quaking tones. “Dat rustlin' soun'—I t'ought it was— ”

Something, then, checked my angry retort and the lunge I was about to make forward for the weapon. It was the appearance of another face—a white man's—over the Negro's shoulder. A saturnine face with aristocratic features and bulging forehead. Judging from the way he towered over the gigantic Negro, the second man could hardly be more than a few inches short of seven feet. But that wasn't what froze me dead in my tracks. It was that the face was unmistakably that of Malcolm Orne, the midget.

The Negro was grasped and swung aside as if he were a piece of furniture. The gun was lifted from his nerveless fingers as if it were a child's toy. Then the giant bowed low and said, “A thousand pardons! Welcome to Orne House!”

Helen's scream, long delayed, turned to hysterical laughter. Then the storm, recommencing with redoubled fury, shattered the hush and sent us hurrying into the hall.

The giant's teeth flashed in a smile. “One moment, please,” he murmured to us, then turned and seized the cowering Negro by the slack of the coat, slapped his face twice, hard.

“You are never to touch that gun, Buford!” Again the Negro's head was buffeted by a solid blow. “You almost killed my guests. They would be well within their rights if they demanded your arrest.”