What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (5 page)

Again Jane shook her head. “He didn’t write any letter, either. There hasn’t been a letter from his office since——”

“Yes, Jane, yes, there was!”

“I bring in the mail,” Jane said with maddening evenness. “I guess I’d know.”

Blanche’s face, by now, was hot with embarrassment. She moistened her lips nervously. “Then it must have come sometime before. He sent it with our allowance check.”

“That was nearly a month ago. This month’s check is almost due. Why——?”

“Jane,” Blanche broke in desperately, “it doesn’t matter when or how I heard from Bert. That’s not what we’re talking about. The point is…”

Before Jane’s merciless gaze, her voice fell weakly away into silence. A faint smile, it seemed, tugged at the corners of Jane’s mouth like a fleeting shadow.

“You’re lying,” she said calmly, flatly. “You’re just a liar, Blanche.”

Blanche started forward in her chair, but then the telephone shrilled and she looked around in a quick, convulsive movement toward the desk. The sound came so suddenly and so shockingly that she was unable even to get her chair into motion before Jane came back into the room and snatched up the telephone.

“Jane!”

Undeterred, Jane carried the phone from the room out into the hallway. With the briefest backward glance, she picked up the receiver. “Hello?” she enquired.

Too astonished to make any further protest Blanche listened in numb helplessness.

“Oh?… No.… No, she’s not here right now.… Oh, no, that’s not so at all.… Well, she’s mistaken; she isn’t interested at all.… Oh, yes, I’m sure.… Of course I am.… Well, then she’s changed her mind, so you can just forget it.… Oh, yes, I will if you want me to.… Oh, I’m sure all right, I’m positive.… Yes… Yes, I will.… All right, if you want—but… Yes.… All right, then.… Good-bye.”

Replacing the receiver, she put the instrument back on the stand from which Blanche had first taken it. Turning, she started toward the gallery and the stairs.

“Jane!”

As Blanche moved her chair forward, Jane reappeared in the doorway, her eyes enormous with innocent enquiry.

“That was Bert on the phone, wasn’t it?”

For a long moment Jane simply stood there. Then, finally, she shook her head. “It was one of those women who advertise on the phone. Something about having the furniture reupholstered. I said you weren’t interested.”

“But you said I had changed my mind. Jane, I know you’re not——”

“She said you were on their interested list,” Jane explained blandly, “but of course she was lying.” Again the faintest shadow of a smile touched the corners of her mouth. “If I were you, I wouldn’t wear myself out talking to people on the phone.”

“Jane…”

“Any other calls—I’ll take them downstairs—so you won’t have to talk to anyone.”

“Jane, please…”

But Jane had already moved off into the dimness, and Blanche knew she would not turn back.

Rolling her chair to the doorway, she sat looking out at the phone. It was Bert who had called. There wasn’t the least bit of doubt in her mind about that. And there wasn’t any doubt, either, that Jane had warned her not to try to call Bert back. But suppose she defied her and called anyway? What would Jane do? Blanche’s gaze fell briefly to her withered legs and then moved away again. The silence there in the old house seemed almost to congeal and contract around her. With a feeling of sudden panic, she turned back into her room.

She spent a long moment reasoning with herself, scolding herself back into a state of calmness. How silly to be upset by Jane’s shenanigans. At this late date! Nothing so terrible had happened. Jane had always been like this, always trying to worry her and frighten her. When they were little girls, Jane had repeatedly
taken her toys from her and withheld them—just as she had taken the phone from her now by threat.

She was simply allowing herself to get into a nervous state over nothing. And she knew what she must do—she would wait for a bit and then, when she was fully composed and sure of herself, she would call Bert and tell him what had happened. And Jane—well, let her do her worst.

She turned her chair toward the window, stopping it in mid-turn as her eye was caught by the sight of the lunch tray on the desk. Lunch. Yes, that was a good idea. First, she would have her lunch. She would eat slowly and calmly and get herself completely under control. She would relax as she ate and forget all about the incident with the phone—and her abortive attempt to “explain” to Jane about selling the house. And afterward, allowing the proper interval for digestion, she would go straight to the phone and call.

In a mood of self-congratulation she moved her chair toward the desk. She was being very sensible, keeping her emotions admirably in check. And the more she thought of it, too, the more she began to see that this morning’s upset was at least partly due to yesterday’s discussion with Mrs. Stitt. Well, she would just let that be a lesson to her. Henceforth, she would turn a deaf ear to the alarms of others; she would refuse absolutely to give audience to tales out of school.

With the beginning of a smile on her lips, Blanche reached out to the tray, picked up the cloth and pulled it away. Instantly the smile fell from her face, and her hand froze in mid-air. Her eyes stared from a face white with shock. She darted a hand to her mouth, to stifle the scream that was already rising in her throat.

It seemed ages that she sat there staring at the dreadful thing on the plate, at the bird stiff with death that lay there before her, returning her gaze of horror from empty eye sockets. It had been a small bird, a sparrow or robin and it had lain so long in death that it had gone even beyond the state of putrefaction. All that
remained, really, were a few matted feathers, some of the thin parchmentlike skin and the delicate white bones. This, with macabre deliberation, had been placed at the center of a carefully arranged ring of lettuce, and upon the back of the corpse had been obscenely spattered a thick dab of mayonnaise. Beside the plate, resting on a napkin bearing Blanche’s initials, were a precisely placed knife and fork.

T
he shadows of evening had begun to gather thickly around her, and on the carpet the patterned oblong of light from the window had started to lengthen and fade. The worst of her terror had passed now, but only the worst of it, only the cold, white sting of panic. She was still unable to hold her gaze for long away from the dreadful tray on the desk no matter how much the sight of it sickened her.

Mercifully it was covered, though she had no recollection of having replaced the cloth. The moment following the one in which she had first seen the horror on the tray had passed in a sick, tumultuous blur. It was as if that small space of time had been completely lost to her; the next thing she remembered she was out in the hallway at the phone frantically dialing Dr. Shelby’s number.

Instinct, perhaps, had prompted her to call the doctor, or she may have recalled Mrs. Stitt’s insistence that she consult the doctor about Jane. She had not stopped, though, to consider her motives. Dialing the number, she had pressed the receiver to her ear and breathlessly waited.

Had she not been so nearly in a state of shock, she would have known instantly that something was wrong. As it was, fully half a minute passed before she realized that the phone was dead.

At first she simply couldn’t believe it; it was impossible that the instrument should fail her just when she needed it so desperately. And then, with a new start of panic, she understood what had
happened; Jane had taken the phone downstairs off the hook to prevent her calling out. At the same moment that this disquieting bit of knowledge came into her mind, she became aware, as before, of the soft sound of breathing on the line.

A moment passed, two. The breathing continued, marking Jane’s listening presence there at the phone in the lower hallway. Blanche shook her head in frightened disbelief. It was insane. As insane, nearly as—as making a salad of a dead bird.

“Jane!” she cried out suddenly. “Jane——!”

The sound of her voice struck sharply against the silence there in the hallway, broke and shattered it. She fell back aghast at what she had done. Quickly, thrusting the receiver from her, she dropped it into its cradle and turned away. She looked back into her room and it was then that she saw, with an audible sigh of relief, that she had covered the tray with the cloth.

The afternoon had passed as an unreal, sunlit nightmare, and Blanche, shrinking from the crystalline brightness that poured in at the window, had cowered in the false safety of the shadows by her bed. Forced upon her was the realization that Jane, having terrorized her, had also made her a helpless prisoner.

But why? Blanche asked herself. For what possible purpose? That was the worst of it, not knowing what dark inspiration lay behind this strange program of terror. Did Jane mean only to frighten her? Was this her way to voice a protest against selling the house? Or was it meant as a warning? These questions, no matter how they repeated themselves over and over in her mind, remained unanswered.

Jane wouldn’t hurt her, wouldn’t do her physical violence; Blanche felt certain of that. Jane would never do anything, surely, to increase the awful burden of guilt she had borne all these years since the accident. There was nothing, Blanche told herself, really to fear.

There in the shadows, she kept a book in her lap so that she could pretend to be calmly reading if Jane should suddenly appear.
Knowing full well that she hadn’t the courage yet to confront Jane openly and demand the meaning of this horror, she had decided that when Jane did come into the room, it would be best to pretend not to have lifted the cloth at all, not to have seen the odious display beneath. If Jane should ask, she would simply say she hadn’t been hungry. Tomorrow when she was feeling more collected, she would insist that they discuss the matter fully and openly.

Mercifully, through the afternoon Jane had not come near the room, or even upstairs to the second floor. There had been occasional sounds of movement from down below, but nothing in any way extraordinary or alarming. Now, however, with the coming of twilight, the sounds grew louder and more frequent. And then, almost exactly at the moment when the last faint traces of daylight faded from the room, Jane’s footsteps approached with sudden briskness through the lower hallway and across the living room to the stairs.

Blanche reached out quickly to the bedside lamp and switched it on, commanding herself at the same time to be calm and composed. She watched shudderingly as the circle of light dashed itself out into the room, reaching, it seemed, with soft fingers for the desk and the repugnant tray.

She could not guess what Jane’s attitude might be, what she might say or do. Taking up the book from her lap, she propped it firmly against the arm of her chair in an effort to hold it steady.

When Jane came into the room, Blanche kept her eyes rigidly lowered to the book. Even so, she felt the panic rise again within her, suddenly, sharply. In an effort to hold it back, she told herself that she must not let herself be hysterical. There was nothing, really, to be frightened about. Nonetheless her hands tightened their hold upon the book, as if in an effort to brace her entire being against the assault of any word or gesture that might come from Jane’s direction.

Jane, meanwhile, showed no inclination at all toward communicativeness. Carrying a new tray—Blanche’s dinner tray this
time—she crossed directly to the desk and put it down beside the one already there.

At the corner of Blanche’s eye there appeared two monstrous mounds of white horror in the shadows beyond the reach of the light. And then, taking up the dreadful lunch tray, Jane, still without a glance in Blanche’s direction, turned and made her way out of the room. Not until her footsteps had faded off down the stairs did Blanche let the book fall from her trembling hands back into her lap.

The white-shrouded tray loomed sharply out of the dimness, seeming to swell in size and grow enormous. She closed her eyes against the sight, but it was still there before her in the darkness of her mind. And then she paused, sniffing the air around her. Was there an odor? Of warm food? Of roasted meat? She opened her eyes and sniffed again. This time Jane had brought her a proper meal. She started hesitantly forward, but stopped again, abruptly, as the odor suddenly soured in her nostrils and became the stink of death and decaying flesh. She leaned forward and lowered her head into her hands, fearful that she was going to be sick.

And then, slowly, it came to her—the reason why Jane was doing this to her. She meant to kill her, to starve her to death! She intended to create in Blanche so strong a terror of what she would find on the trays at mealtime that she would not dare to go near them. Blanche was certain of it; it was exactly the sort of diabolical scheme that would appeal to Jane. In time she would be able to bring perfectly good meals into the room, just as before, and be assured that Blanche would refuse to eat them or even go near them. And in the end, when Blanche died of starvation in the midst of plenty, who would ever think to blame Jane?

Blanche returned her gaze to the covered tray on the desk. She was not mistaken in this conjecture; she was positive she wasn’t. She and Jane were embarked upon a weird and deadly kind of guessing game. Each tray brought in from now on would contain either some monstrous horror like the dead bird or a perfectly
good meal. It was up to Blanche to try to guess which was which. Her eyes fixed upon the tray, Blanche reached out to the wheel of her chair and began again to move forward. At least she knew now the kind of madness she was up against. That helped.

Within three feet of the desk she stopped. Leaning forward, she studied the confirmation of the white cloth over the tray, trying to determine what lay beneath it. The highest protuberance was surely a glass, a tumbler, but there was no clue to anything else. The odor now was much stronger, but it still alternated in her mind and upon her senses, first as the smell of roasted meat and then as the stench of moldering decay.

Forcing herself closer, she leaned forward and reached out her hand. But then she pulled it back sharply, thinking she had seen a movement, a faint, flickering alteration in the white folds of the cloth. She told herself it was only a trick of the light, the shadow of her moving hand. But her imagination had already begun to conjure up new horrors, things much worse than the dead bird at lunchtime. It insisted that the tray contained something alive—a live rat, writhing and kicking in a trap! Returning her hand to the wheel of her chair, she began to back away again toward the shadows.

For a moment she sat, breathless, watching the tray for further signs of movement, but there were none.

Of course not,
she scolded herself, angry with herself now for being a frightened, weak-willed fool,
what nonsense! There’s nothing alive under that cloth. Fool! You’ve simply worked yourself into another state of blind panic.

Very deliberately she took a long, deep breath and let it out again. Yes, she had been giving away to panic, and quite long enough, too. One brooding eccentric in the house was enough. She made herself face around to the tray again, made herself look at it steadily.

There was the possibility that she was right about Jane’s plan to starve her through terror. But only the possibility. It could just
as easily be that Jane was only behaving in accordance with some distorted, childish impulse that had no precise meaning at all. In either case the thing to do was simply to refuse to be terrified, to return to the tray and remove the cloth and determine once and for all whether it contained her dinner or another horror. Even if it should turn out to be the worst of the things she feared, the shock could not possibly be as great as it had been the first time. Now she was forewarned.

Steeling herself, she moved back again toward the desk. She had not covered more than half the distance, however, when she stopped. She sat for a moment staring straight ahead and then all at once she collapsed forward and buried her face in her hands. She couldn’t do it. Suddenly she knew it. She simply hadn’t the courage; Jane had won. Convulsively, helplessly she began to sob.

The first light of dawn, coming into the room by deflection, had been gray and oppressive, and Blanche, still huddled, as she had been through the night, in her wheel chair, had been fearful that the day would not be fine. Poor weather would spoil everything.

Since the dawn, however, she had dozed, and now, with the passing of more than three hours, there had been a sufficient gathering of warmth and brightness to reassure her. Turning, she looked back toward the door into the hallway. It was still closed. And the tray on the desk was still there. Jane, then, had not come into the room while she was asleep. She looked back toward the clock on the bedstand. It was nearing nine o’clock, now, the hour when Mrs. Bates usually made the first of her two daily visits to the garden.

Moving her chair as close as possible to the window, she set the brake. That done, she gripped the arms of the chair and started to pull herself up and forward. Bracing herself with her right leg, the one that still contained some slight glimmering of life, she managed slowly to raise herself just up a bit and out of the chair.
Craning to see, she peered down into the garden below. It was deserted. The house, at the far end of the garden, was still closed; the blinds were still drawn on the French doors. With a faint sigh of impatience, Blanche let herself back into her chair.

The fear and panic which had kept her awake through most of the night had begun to be dimmed with the coming of the small, still hours of the morning. Exhaustion notwithstanding, as the grip of fear had begun to relax its hold upon her mind and body, she had begun to think and reason more clearly. She had seen that even without the telephone there was still a way to summon assistance.

No sooner had the idea come to her than she had gotten a pad of note paper and a pencil and gone to work.

Mrs. Bates
(she had written in a wide, agitated scrawl)
This is from your neighbor, Blanche Hudson. I am forced to ask your help in a very serious matter. For reasons I cannot explain in this note, I am not able to use my telephone. As I need desperately to reach my doctor, I am asking you to call him for me. His name is Dr. Warren Shelby, and his office number is OL 6–
5541.
Please ask him to come here to my home to see me as quickly as possible. Tell him not to call beforehand but just to come. Please do this for me. It is a matter of life and death.

She had signed the note with her initials and then added a postscript:
Please do not, under any circumstances, disturb my sister about this matter.

When she had finished it, she had folded it over carefully and put it in the right-hand pocket of her robe, where it would be handy when she needed it. Almost immediately afterward, with the relief of having put into progress a plan that she was confident would work, she finally dozed off.

And then she dreamed.

In her dream she had been a little girl again, five or six years old, and she had been walking with her mother along a deserted stretch of beach in the late afternoon. As they walked, the waves
reached toward them from across the sloping sand, rolling up and up, falling, crashing, growing darker as the minutes passed, with approaching dusk. A soft mist had risen from the water and was beginning to drift up toward the row of small wooden summer cottages on the rise. Little Blanche clung tightly to her mother’s hand, for the way ahead was blurred by her own tears.

Actually it had been a fragment from the past, less dreamed than remembered, for once long ago it had been a part of something that had really happened.

It had all begun earlier that afternoon, out on the porch where Jane and her father were practicing.

The daily practice period was religiously maintained in order to keep Jane “in shape,” even during her month of holiday, and to prepare new material for the fall bookings. It took place between the hours of two and four and was held out on the porch, according to their father’s explanation, so that Jane might take full advantage of the healthful salt air. If, at the same time, a large number of onlookers was attracted from the ranks of the casual visitors on the beach, and from the tenants of the adjacent cottages, neither he nor Jane seemed especially to mind.