Final Reckonings (36 page)

Unfortunately he wasn't looking for a picture. He had plenty of subjects in mind. Right now he was looking for a place in which to paint. He wanted a studio, wanted it quickly. And it must be cheap. Running water and north light were luxuries beyond his present consideration. As for other aesthetic elements, such as cleanliness — Stone shrugged as he mounted the stairs, his long fingers trailing dust from the rickety railing.

There was dust everywhere, for this was the domain of dust, of darkness and desertion. He stumbled upward into the silence.

The first two floors of the building were entirely empty, just as Freed had told him. And the stairs to the loft were at the end of the hall on the second floor.

"You'll have it all to yourself," the rental agent had promised. "But remember to stay in the loft. Nobody'd ever bother looking up there. Damned inspectors come around — they keep telling us to raze the building. But the floor's safe enough. All you got to do is keep out of sight — why, you could hide out there for years without being caught. It's no palace, but take a look and see what you think. For twenty bucks a month you can't go wrong."

Stone nodded now as he walked down the debris-littered hall toward the loft stairs. He couldn't go wrong. He sensed, suddenly and with utter certainty, that this was the place he'd been searching for during all of these frustrating futile weeks. He moved up the stairs with inevitable —

Then he heard the sound.

Call it a thud; call it a thump; call it a muffled crash. The important thing was that it sounded from above, from the deserted loft.

Stone paused on the second step from the top. There was someone in the loft.
For twenty bucks a month you cant go wrong
—but
you could hide out there for years without being caught
.

Barton Stone was not a brave man. He was only a poor artist, looking for a cheap loft or attic to use as a studio. But his need was great, great enough to impel him upward, carry him to the top of the loft stairs and down the short corridor leading to the entry.

He moved quietly now, although there was thunder in his chest. He tiptoed delicately toward the final door, noted the overhead transom, noted, too, the small crate in the corner against the wall.

There was silence beyond the door and silence in the hall now as he carefully lifted the crate and placed it so that he could mount the flat top and peer over the open transom.

No sense in being melodramatic, he told himself. On the other hand, there was no sense rushing in — Barton Stone was not a fool and he didn't want to become an angel.

He looked over the transom.

The loft was huge. A dusty skylight dominated the ceiling, and enough light filtered through to bathe the room in sickly luminance. Stone could see everything, everything.

He saw the books, stacked man-high, row after row of thick books. He saw the sheaves bulked between the books, pile after pile of sheaves. He saw the papers rising in solid walls from the floor. He saw the table in the center of the loft — the table, bulwarked on three sides by books and sheaves and papers all tossed together in toppling towers.

And he saw the man.

The man sat behind the table, back to the wall, surrounded on three sides by the incredible array of printed matter. He sat there, head down, and peered at the pages of an opened book. He never looked up, never made a sound, just sat there and stared.

Stone stared back. He understood the source of the noise now; one of the books had fallen from its stack. But nothing else made sense to him. His eyes sought clues; his mind sought meaning.

The man was short, fat, middle-aged. His hair was graying into white, his face lining into wrinkles. He wore a dirty khaki shirt and trousers and he might have been an ex-GI, a tramp, a fugitive from justice, an indigent bookdealer, an eccentric millionaire.

Stone moved from the realm of might-have-been to a consideration of what he actually saw. The little fat man was riffling through the pages of a fat, paperbound book which could easily be mistaken for a telephone directory. He turned the pages, apparently at random, with his left hand. Very well, then; he was left-handed.

Or was he? His right hand moved across the table, raised and poised so that the sunlight glittered in a thin line of silver against the object he held.

It was a pin, a long, silver pin. Stone stared at it. The man was staring at it too. Stone's gaze held curiosity. The little fat man's gaze held utter loathing and, more than that, a sort of horrified fascination.

Another sound broke the stillness. The little man sighed. It was a deep sight that became, with abrupt and hideous clarity, a groan.

Eyes still intent on the pin, the little man brought it down suddenly upon the opened pages of his book. He stabbed at random, driving the point home. Then he hurled the book to the floor, sat back, buried his face in his hands, and his shoulders shook with silent sobbing.

A second sped. Stone blinked. And beyond the door, in the loft, the little man straightened up, reaching for a long sheet of paper that might have been a polling list, and scanned its surface. The pin poised itself over the center of the sheet. Again the sigh, the stab, the sob.

Now the little man rose, and for a frantic moment Stone wondered if he'd been detected. But no, the pin wielder merely wandered down the row of books and pulled out another thick volume. He carried it back to the table and sat down, picking up the pin with his right hand as his left turned page after page. He scanned, scrutinized, then sighed, stabbed, sobbed.

Barton Stone descended from the top of the crate, replaced it carefully in the corner, and tiptoed down the stairs. He moved carefully and silently, and it was an effort to do so, because he wanted all the while to run.

His feeling was irrational, and he knew it, but he could not control himself. He had always experienced that sudden surge of fear in the presence of the demented. When he saw a drunk in a bar, he was afraid — because you never know what a drunk will do next, what will enter his mind and how he will act. He shied away from arguments, because of what happens to a man's reaction pattern when he sees red. He avoided the mumblers, the people who talk to themselves or to the empty air as they shuffle down the street.

Right now he was afraid of a little fat man, a little fat man with a long, sharp, silver needle. The needle was crooked at one end, Stone remembered — and he could see that needle sinking into his own throat, right up to the crooked angle. The fat man was crazy and Stone wanted no part of him. He'd go back to the rental agency, see Mr. Freed, tell him. Freed could evict him, get him out of there in a hurry. That would be the sensible way.

Before he knew it, Stone was back in his own walk-up flat, resting on the bed and staring at the wall. Although it wasn't the wall he was seeing. He was seeing the little fat man and studying him as he sat at his big table. He was seeing the books and the sheaves and the long rolls and scrolls of paper.

He could group them in the background, so. Just sketch them in lightly, in order to place the figure. The khaki shirt hung thusly — and the open collar draped in this fashion. Now the outlines of the head and shoulders; be sure to catch the intent intensity, the concentrated concentration of the pose.

Stone had his sketchpad out now, and his hands moved furiously. The sunlight would serve as a high light over the shoulder. It would strike the silver pin and the reflection would fleck the features of the face.

The features — the face — most important. He began to rough it in. If he could only capture the instant before the sob, if he could only fathom the secret of the eyes as the pin stabbed down, he'd have a painting.

What was that look? Stone had unconsciously catalogued and categorized the features. The proportions of nose to forehead, ears to head, chin to jaw; the relationship of brow and cheekbone to the eyes — he knew them and reproduced them. But the expression itself—particularly that look around the eyes — that was the key to it all.

And he couldn't get it down. He drew, erased, drew again. He made a marginal sketch and rubbed it out. The charcoal smeared his palm.

No, it was wrong, all wrong. He'd have to see him again. He was afraid to go, but he wanted that painting. He wanted to do it; he
had
to do it. There was a mystery here, and if he could only pin it down on canvas he'd be satisfied.

Pin
it down. The pin was what frightened him, he knew it now. It wasn't the man so much. Granted, he was probably insane — without the pin he'd be harmless, deprived of weapons.

Stone stood up. He went out, down the stairs, walked. He should have gone to the rental agency first, he told himself, but the other need was greater. He wanted to see his subject once more. He wanted to stare into the face of the little fat man and read the secret behind the planes and angles.

And he did. He climbed the stairs silently, mounted the crate quietly, directed his soundless gaze over the transom.

The fat man was still at work. New books, new papers bulked high on the big table. But the left hand turned the pages, the right hand poised the pin. And the endless, enigmatic pantomime played on. Sigh, stab, sob. Stop and shudder, shuffle through fresh pages, scan and scrutinize again, and then — sigh, stab, sob.

The silver pin glared and glistened. It glowed and glittered and grew.

Barton Stone tried to study the face of the fat man, tried to impress the image of his eyes.

Instead he saw the pin. The pin and only the pin. The pin that poised, the pin that pointed, the pin that pricked the page.

He forced himself to concentrate on the little man's face, forced himself to focus on form and features. He saw sorrow, read resignation, recognized revulsion, found fear there. But there was neither sorrow nor resignation, revulsion nor fear in the hand that drove the pin down again and again, There was only a mechanical gesture, without pattern or meaning that Barton Stone could decipher. It was the action of a lunatic, the antic gesture of aberration.

Stone stepped down from the crate, replaced it in the corner, then paused before the loft door. For a moment he hesitated. It would be so simple merely to walk into the loft, confront the little man, ask him his business. The little man would look up, and Stone could stare into his eyes, single out and scrutinize the secrets there.

But the little man had his pin, and Stone was afraid. He was afraid of the pin that didn't sob or sigh but merely stabbed down. And made its point.

The point — what was it?

Well, there was another way of finding out, the sensible way. Stone sidled softly down the stairs, padded purposefully up the street.

Here it was,
ACME RENTALS
. But the door was locked. Barton Stone glanced at his watch. Only four o'clock. Funny he'd be gone so early, unless he'd left with a client to show some property or office space.

Stone sighed. Tomorrow, then. Time enough. He turned and strode back down the street. He intended to go to his flat and rest before supper, but as he rounded the corner he saw something that stopped him in his tracks.

It was only a brownish blur, moving very fast. His eye caught a glimpse of khaki, a suggestion of a bowed back, a white-thatched head disappearing into the doorway of a local restaurant. That was enough; he was sure now. His little fat man had taken time out to eat.

And that meant. . .

Stone ran the remaining blocks, clattered up the rickety stairs. He burst into the loft, raced over to the table. Then, and then only, he stopped. What was he doing here? What did he hope to find out? What was he looking for?

That was it. He was looking for something. Some clue, some intimation of the little fat man's perverted purpose.

The books and papers billowed balefully all about him. There were at least half a hundred presently on the table. Stone picked up the first one. It was a telephone directory, current edition, for Bangor, Maine. Beneath it was another — Yuma, Arizona. And below that, in a gaudy cover, the city directory of Montevideo. At one side a long list of names, sheet after sheet of them, in French. The town roll of Dijon. And over at one side the electoral rolls of Manila, RL Another city directory — Stone guessed it must be in Russian. And here was the phone book from Leeds, and the census sheets from Calgary, and a little photostat of the unofficial census of Mombasa.

Stone paged through them, then directed his attention to another stack on the right-hand side of the table. Here were opened books aplenty, piled one upon the other in a baffling miscellany. Stone glanced at the bottom of the collection. Another phone book, from Seattle. City directory of Belfast. Voting list from Bloomington, Illinois. Precinct polling list, Melbourne, Australia. Page after page of Chinese ideographs. Military personnel, USAF, Tokyo base. A book in Swedish or Norwegian — Stone wasn't sure which, but he recognized that it contained nothing but names; and like all the others it was recent or currently published and in use.

And here, right on top, was a Manhattan directory. It was open, like the others, and apparently the choice of page had been made on random impulse. Barton Stone glanced at the heading:
FRE
. Was there a pin mark? He stared, found it.

Freed, George A
. And the address.

Wait a minute! Wasn't that
his
rental agency man? Something began to form and fashion, and then Stone pushed the book away and ran out of the room and down the stairs, and he rounded the corner and found the newsstand and bought his paper and clawed it open to the death notices, and then he read the name again.

Freed, George A
. And the address. And on another page — Stone's hands were trembling, and it took him a while to find it — was the story. It had happened this morning. Accident. Hit by a truck crossing the street. Survived by blah, blah, blah.

Yes, blah, blah, blah, and this morning (perhaps while Stone has been watching him the first time) the pin had pointed and stabbed and a name in the directory was marked for destruction. For death.