The Perfect Host (15 page)

She slung her coat on the end of the divan—an act quite foreign to habit—and turned to look at Golly, who was teetering toe-to-heel in the center of the room, staring at her through those narrowed eyes. They were so like Paul’s, and yet had such a different light.

“Golly,” she said, “I’d like you a lot better if you tried just a little bit to act like a—a gentleman.”

“Maybe I don’t want you to like me any better.”

“Wh-what?”

“Sure. I don’t want dames tagging along after me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself!” She stopped, confused by her use of the same phrase she had hurled at Paul. “What do you want?”

He raised his eyebrows interrogatively and lit a cigarette.

“What did you come for? What do you want?”

“Hm. Peevish tonight,” he grunted. He threw his match on the rug and came toward her. She ducked under his arm and picked up the match. He did not try to stop her.

She felt suddenly afraid—afraid with no sense of excitement, afraid even to run from him, because she knew she could never get away.

“You saw Paul the other night.”

She had no denial, could find none, could find no voice for one. Her eyes were round.

He stepped close to her, stooped a little to look into her face with his veined-marble gaze, cupping her chin in his hard hand. When he spoke his voice was soft and very gentle, like Paul’s. “Oh, Sandra, Sanny, I
told
you not to see him. I told you! Why did you do it?”

“Golly,” she whispered. “Don’t look at me like that. I—”

He slapped her across the face twice, with the front and back of his hand. When she raised her arms, he hit her hard in the pit of the stomach. As she began to sag, his fist crashed into the side of her jaw. She hurtled backward, struck the divan and slid to the floor.

Golly stood looking at her until he saw a rhythmic pulse in her neck. “Paul!” he said, and threw a bone-crushing right fist into his left palm. Then he walked out, leaving the door open.

Sandra lay there for over an hour, though she was not unconscious all that time. She reeled to her feet presently, with some vague notion of gong to the telephone. Instead she went up to the bedroom and fell asleep there.

She dreamed. A horrible thing, in which Paul and Golly circled around her. Paul was smiling and Golly was grinning and what made it horrible was that neither of them was all there. They were half-men, sometimes the top half and sometimes the right and sometimes the left, and where the real part ended there was blood.

She tossed and screamed, and she burst out laughing and woke herself up. She rose and showered and went to bed again, sleeping very late.

The next day she called Paul Egan. She spoke urgently, hurriedly, saying only that she wanted him, needed him. He agreed to come. When he arrived she was on the porch, waiting. She had been there a long time, looking down the road, a circle of words running through her mind, losing their meaning, losing everything but the power of hate they carried. Paul kills Golly kills Paul kills Golly kills Paul.…

It was dusk when he came. She caught his arm and drew him inside, reaching back for the switch of the hanging lamp in the foyer.

“You see, Paul? You see?”

He looked at the knobbed discoloration on her cheek and jaw and nodded. “The scum. The dirty scum. Why did he do it?”

“Because of you, Paul.” She put her face in his shoulder, and his arms went around her, easily, quietly. “Paul, Paul, he’s going to kill you.”

Paul tightened his arms around her and then pressed her away. He shrugged out of his coat and hung it on the newel post. “When was he here?”

“Last night, early.”

“I—had an idea.” She wished she could see his face.

“You had? Paul, why didn’t you come?”

He laughed a little. “Last time I was here you said you wanted no violence. Remember?”

“Yes. Well—I—got the violence. What are we going to do?”

“Have you any ideas?”

“I want him killed,” she said dully, and cringed as if from herself. “Paul! I didn’t mean that! I—Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying!”

“Killing him wouldn’t be a way out,” Paul said in a harsh voice. “We’ve got to—I’ve got—” He clutched his face, rocking his head back and forth. “If I could only know what he was doing—find out how he—”

“There can’t be a showdown, if that’s what you mean,” she said, coming to him, comforting him. “He’d be on you like a snake.”

“Oh no. You don’t understand. He wouldn’t work that way, no matter how direct and violent he seems to you. He’d figure something out cleverly, set a trap for me. He wouldn’t—do anything to me directly.”

“He’s afraid of you!”

“Perhaps he is,” whispered Paul. His upper lip was wet. “I can’t stand any more of this, Sandra, I can’t. We’ll have to force his hand. If he once tries to kill me and fails, I don’t think he’ll ever come back. It’s as far as he can go.”

“Why? I don’t see why. Why don’t you find him? Why don’t you have him arrested? What kind of a man are you—” her hand strayed
to her bruised face—“that you can think of waiting for him to make the next move after
this?
”

He looked at her, and the twisted agony in his eyes wrung something within her. “Trust me, Sandra. I know what I’m up against. I tell you, if he tries and fails, you’ll never see him again. I
know
. Trust me.”

She took his hands. “He’ll kill you.”

“I think not. Not if I’m careful. Not if I watch every move I make. I know how he works. He will set some sort of trap somewhere where I do something regularly. I must do nothing quite the same until he tries to—to—Oh, Sandra! Why did this have to happen to you? I love you. You asked for none of this. Maybe it would be better if I went away and never—”

She closed his mouth with her hand. “I thought of that, Paul. Maybe I’m crazy—maybe something’s wrong with me, I don’t know; but nobody, nobody ever before was willing to risk being killed for me. You could run away and hide, but you’re sticking to face it—for me. I’m not afraid.”

There were no words in what they had to say to each other after that.

Later, he looked at his watch. “San, can you spend the night in town? I’ll get a hotel reservation for you. You’ll be quite safe. I’ll have lunch with you, and dinner, and we’ll go to a show. Then I’ll bring you back here. He’ll know, you see; and when we get back here tomorrow night, together, he’ll try. I know him.”

She rose. “You’re sure, Paul?”

“I’m sure.”

She ran to get her bag packed.

He phoned her, anxiously, at bedtime, and again the next morning. They had lunch together at the Criterion, and dinner at the Sable Antelope, and took in a show.

In the taxi on the way back to her house, they were tense and silent until she asked, “You think he will be there?”

He nodded. “He should be. He knows … he must know.”

She moved closer to him, and after a moment said, “Paul, don’t—kill him.”

“It isn’t likely that I would,” he said gently.

“Don’t. Not for his sake, but—”

He held her close. “I know. I know,” he murmured.

The cab deposited them at the curb and droned away with its life and its lights. They stood breathless, listening.

“I’m scared,” she whispered. She felt his noiseless chuckle.

“Sure sign you’re normal,” he answered. “Come on.”

She held back, questioning his sudden decisiveness. He bent and kissed her swiftly, a gesture so tender that again she was joltingly reminded of Golly’s ruthlessness, and she gasped in terror, feeling Golly so close.

Paul held the gate open for her, and they tiptoed up the path. She would have mounted the steps, but he stopped her.

“This is the way we always come,” he reminded her. “We must not do anything the same. I know him, darling. Some habit-pattern, some little, usual thing I do—that’s where he’ll ambush me. I
know
, Sandra. Uh—have you a key to the kitchen door?”

She nodded, and they crept around the house. Once a twig cracked somewhere, and once a dog howled down the road, and both times they froze and stood for minutes, their nerves strumming.

“Be funny if Golly wasn’t around here at all,” Paul breathed.

“Oh, he is, I know he is!” Sandra half sobbed. “Oh. I wish we were inside!”

“Don’t be frightened!” he said, shaking her a little. “As long as you stay close to me he’ll do nothing. If he wanted to kill you, he’d have done it the other night. It’s me he’s after. Hurry; open the door.”

The key was annoyingly disobedient in her fingers, but she got the door open. She pulled him in and away from it and slid the bolt. Then she turned on the light and screamed at the looming bulk in the corner.

“Silly! It’s just your raincoat!” Paul hissed.

It was, and the reaction was crushing. She clung to him, trembling.

When she had quieted, he spoke. “You’re quite safe now, San. Turn out the light. I’ll go. No one will see me slip out, it’s so dark. I’ve outwitted him so far. If I can once get home, I can—lock myself in. But I wish he tries. I wish he tries to kill me, and fails. If he does, he will never come back.”

“Oh Paul, I hope you’re right! I hope you know what you’re doing!” she cried.

“I do, darling. Truly I do. Trust me. And don’t worry. I’ll be careful. Good night, darling.” He did not attempt to kiss her, and again she had that suffocating awareness of Golly’s presence.

In the darkness he left her. A blacker piece of blackness, he glided out to the door and entered the garden.

She reshot the bolt, and ran to the front windows. She could just see him out there, stepping softly along the edge of the path, on the lawn, freezing suddenly as the willows rustled in the casual breeze.

After a long while he moved again, reached the gate, and instead of swinging it wide as he usually did, opened it only enough to let him slide through. He let it close, leaned back over it, and stared carefully all around him. Her eyelids strained in sympathy with his.

Then he stood erect, and with the old, endearing gesture, whipped off his hat and waved it high over his head. She smiled, and three jets of flame squirted toward him and he fell writhing to the sidewalk, his agonies drowning out the echoes of the gunshots.

It seemed to Sandra that he choked for a long, long time. Then she was conscious of the stillness and of the cramped muscles in her cheeks, holding her smile, and of the other, sharper pain of the long splinter she had driven under her fingernail when she clutched at the windowsill.

Then she walked to the telephone and called the police, and sat woodenly in the dark to wait.

There was a fatherly man who asked questions in a soft voice. He had pointed gray eyebrows, and came after all the others, the ones who took Paul away and the ones with floodlights and flash-bulbs.

The fatherly man asked her all about Paul and Golly, and how long she had known them, and how she felt about them, and many questions about herself. She answered them all, the answers seeming to come only from the front of her face. She kept her hands over her eyes, and spoke dully from between the heels of her hands.

When he had stopped his questions, he thought for minutes, silently. She took her hands down then, and began her own questions.

“Where was he?”

“Who?”

“Golly, of course!”

He looked at her sadly.

“There was no one there but Paul.”

“But the guns—”

“The guns were tied to the trees on each side of the path, and to the eaves of the house. There were strings from their triggers, knotted together over the gate. When he waved his hat—”

“He always did that.”

“Of course. He knew that the attempt would be made around some accustomed action—and he forgot to change that one.”

She tossed her head miserably from side to side. “I don’t understand!”

The kindly man spread his hands.

“You’ve heard about the psychosis that sometimes affects twins, haven’t you? The thing that makes one feel incomplete as long as the other exists?”

“I—suppose so.”

“Well, this is just an extension of the same thing.”

“But that’s crazy!”

The man shook his head slightly. “Paul Egan wasn’t exactly all there.”

“Paul?”

“Paul, yes. Paul Egan, the man who murdered himself.”

She sprang up. “But it was Golly! It was Golly who killed Paul!”

“Sandra—you don’t mind if I call you Sandra?—can’t I make you understand? There was only one of them.”

“Oh, no. No. Golly was—”

“—was Paul. Be quiet, now, and listen to me. Paul Egan was what is called a ‘dissociative personality.’ Some people have three or four very strong and quite separate personalities. Paul’s divided quite sharply and completely.”

“But didn’t he know?”

“He knew, all right—but the chances are that he never remembered what he did when he was Golly.”

“Why didn’t he tell me?” she whispered.

“He loved you, I suppose.”

“Why did he let Golly—why did he take that chance?”

The man shrugged. “I can only guess. From what you tell me, I gather that he was convinced that ‘Golly’s’ failure in a murder attempt would be the end of Golly in his life. He probably reasoned that for the ‘Golly’ personality to be caught in an effort to do away with himself would be such a shock that ‘Golly’ would never return.”

“Golly and Paul,” she murmured. “You’re playing with me!” she flared. “I don’t believe it. I won’t! I won’t!”

He caught her wrists, pressed her gently back to her chair. “Listen to me, child. On the guns, on all of Golly’s presents, on the tools that were used to make the booby-trap, and all over the house, are Paul Egan’s fingerprints.”

After a while, Sandra believed it.

I
As Told By
Ronnie Daniels

I
WAS FOURTEEN
then. I was sitting in the car waiting for dad to come out of the hospital. Dad was in there seeing mother. It was the day after dad told me I had a little sister.

It was July, warm, and I suppose about four in the afternoon. It was almost time for dad to come out. I half opened the car door and looked for him.

Someone called, “Mister! Mister!”