You're All Alone (illustrated) (13 page)

“Still, you had one person,” Carr said slowly. “The small dark man with glasses.”

“That’s right,” she said bitterly, “we did meet again.”

“I suppose you lived together?” Carr asked simply.

SHE LOOKED at him. “No, we didn’t. We’d meet here and there, and he taught me how to play chess—we played for days and days—but I never lived with him.”

Carr hesitated. “But surely he must have tried to make love to you,” he said. “And when you realized there was no one in the whole world but the two of you . . .”

“You’re right,” she said uncomfortably. “He did try to make love to me.”

“And you didn’t reciprocate?”

“No.”

“Don’t be angry with me, Jane, but that seems strange. After all, you had only each other.”

She laughed unhappily. “Oh, I would have reciprocated, except for something I found out about him. I don’t like to talk about it, but I suppose I’d better. A few weeks after I ran away, I met him in another park. I came on him unawares and found him holding a little girl. She was standing there, flushed from running, looking very alive, her bright eyes on her playmates, about to rush off and join them. He was sitting on the bench behind her and he had his arm lightly around her and he was stroking her body very tenderly, but with a look in his eyes as if she were so much wood. Sacred wood, perhaps, but wood.” Jane sucked in her breath. “After that I couldn’t bear to have him touch me. In spite of all his gentleness and understanding, there was a part of him that wanted to take advantage of the big machine for his cold private satisfactions—take advantage of poor dead mechanisms because he was aware and they weren’t. You’ve seen the same thing, Carr, in the eyes of Wilson and Hackman and Dris—that desire to degrade, to play like gods (devils, rather) with the poor earthly puppets? Well, something’s corrupting my friend in the same way. He’s never told me. But I know.”

Carr said, “I heard Wilson tell Hackman that your friend had once been hers. It made her very angry.”

“I might have guessed,” Jane said softly. “That’s where the nasty streak in him comes from. And that’s why they’re hunting him—because they’re afraid he’ll betray them to . . . still others.”

“To the four men with black hats?” Carr asked.

She looked at him with a new fear in her eyes. “I never heard of them,” she said.

“Go on,” Carr urged.

“He must have run away from Hackman and Wilson and Dris,” she said, her eyes seeing things distant. “And then, because he was lonely, he was drawn to me, one girl picked from a million. He didn’t want to wake me, because he lacked the courage to love me or corrupt me, either. So he half wakened me, wanting to keep me in a dream world forever.”

She looked at Carr unsmilingly. “I never wanted to do anything like that to you,” she said. “I came to you in desperation, when I was followed by Hackman. I ran into the office because I knew the place from Midge’s boyfriend working there. The applicant’s chair at your desk was empty. I thought you were just another puppet, but I hoped to fool Hackman by pretending to be part of the pattern around you.

“For you see, Carr, they’d never seen me clearly. Hackman couldn’t be sure I was the girl in the alley, though I must have looked enough like her to make Hackman suspicious. And they don’t like to use violent methods of testing whether a person is awake, because they don’t want to disturb the world too much and they’re afraid of attracting the attention of . . . still others. Though in the end she took the risk of slapping my face—and of course I had to walk on without noticing, like a machine.

“But as soon as I realized you were awake, Carr, I did my best to keep you out of it. I knew the only safe thing for you would be to stay in your pattern.”

“How can a wakened person stay in his pattern?” Carr demanded.

“It can be done,” Jane assured him. “Haven’t you managed to stay in your pattern most of the time, even since you’ve known or at least suspected? Haven’t you been able to do and say the right things at your office, even when you were terribly afraid that you couldn’t?”

He had to admit that was so.

“Why, even I could go back to my pattern tomorrow,” Jane continued, “go back to my parents and Mayberry Street and the academy, except—another drink, please—” (There were only drops, but they shared them) “—except that
they
know about me now, they know my pattern and so they’d be able to get me if I should go back.

“So I did my best to keep you out of it,” she hurried on. “The first time I warned you and went away from you. Then that night, when you came to me with all your suspicions of the truth, I laughed at them and I did everything I could to convince you they were unreal . . . and I left you again.”

“But even the first time,” Carr said gently, “you left me that note, telling me where I could meet you.”

SHE LOOKED away from him. “I wasn’t strong enough to make a complete break. I pretended to myself you’d find that first note too silly to bother about. There’s an unscrupulous part of my mind that does things I really don’t want to . . . or perhaps that I really want to. The second time it made me drop that envelope with my address in front of the Beddoes house, where you’d remember it and find it the next evening.”

“Wait a minute,” he said, “how did you know I picked it up the next evening?”

“Because I was watching you,” she admitted, dropping her gaze.

“Watching me?”

“Yes through a crack in one of the boarded-up windows.”

“But why didn’t you come out when you saw me?” Carr asked.

“I didn’t want you to find me again. But I was worried about you and when I saw you pick up that envelope I knew what you were going to do. So I followed you.”

“To Mayberry?”

She nodded. “When you went in I waited outside, hiding in the shadows across the street, until Hackman and Wilson came. Then I ran around through the alley—”

“Remembering what had been there the last time?” Carr interrupted.

She grinned nervously, “—and went up the back stairs. I found you and my friend in the bedroom. He’d just hit you. Hackman and Wilson were killing Gigolo in the front hall—”

“Your cat?”

She shut her eyes. “Yes, Gigolo’s dead.”

She went on after a moment, “While they were doing that I told my friend who you were and we carried you down the back way to his car and . . .”

“How did your friend happen to be there in the first place?” he asked.

“He has queer habits,” she said uncomfortably, “a sort of morbid sentimentality about objects connected with me. He often goes to my room, though I’m never there.”

“All right, so you carried me down to his roadster,” Carr said.

“And then we found your address in your pocketbook and drove you back to your room and put you to bed. I wanted to stay though I knew it wouldn’t be safe for you, but my friend said you’d be all right, so—”

“—you departed,” he finished for her, “after writing me that letter and leaving me those powders. What were they, by the way?”

“Just two sleeping tablets crushed up,” she told him. “I hoped they’d get you started right the day after, help you get back into the pattern. Sleeping tablets are very useful there.” He shook his head. “I can’t get back into the pattern, Jane.”

She leaned toward him. “But you can, Carr. They don’t know anything about you. They may suspect, but they can’t be sure. If you stay in the pattern—your old job, your old girl—they’ll forget their suspicions.”

“I don’t think I could manage it.

I’d crack up,” he said, adding in lower tones, “Besides, I wouldn’t leave you.”

“But I’m lost forever,” she protested. “You aren’t. You still have a safe path through life. You don’t have to stay in the dark museum.”

HE LOOKED around at the actual darkness of the stacks and for the first time it all really hit him. Chicago a dead city, empty as the aisles around them, but here and there at great intervals the faintest of evil rustlings. Hundreds of blocks of death, or non-life, and here two motes of awareness.

“No,” he said slowly, “I won’t go back.”

“But you can’t help me,” she told him. “You’ll only make it harder.” She looked down. “It isn’t because I think you can help me that the unscrupulous part of my mind keeps drawing you back.”

“We could go far away,” Carr said. “We’d still be out of the pattern. More conspicuously than ever. And there would be other gangs.”

“But at the worst these awakened ones are only people, Jane.”

“You think so?” she said scornfully. “You don’t think their minds are strong with the evil wisdom of the wakened, passed down from wakened mind to mind for centuries?”

“But there must be some decent wakened people in the world.”

She shook her head. “I’ve never heard of any, only the cruel little gangs.”

“There’d at least be your friend to help us,” he persisted.

“After tonight? He’s my friend no longer. Besides, fear will make him do anything. He can’t be trusted.”

“But I can help you,” Carr insisted stubbornly. “I had a sign in a dream last night.”

“What was that?”

“It’s fuzzy now, but you and I were prisoners somewhere, all tied up, and I cut your bonds and we escaped.”

“Was that the finish?”

He frowned. “I’m not sure. Maybe something got us in the end.”

“You see?”

“But that was only a dream,” he protested.

“And a sign, you said.”

“Jane, don’t you understand? I have to help you.” He started to put his arms around her, but she quickly got up and turned away.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, following her.

She held her shoulders stiffly, but she had trouble speaking. “Go away, Carr. Go away right now.”

“I can’t, Jane.”

“Now, Carr. Please.”

“No, Jane, I won’t.”

She stood there a moment longer. Then her shoulders sagged. Carr felt the tension go out of him too. He rubbed his eyes.

“Lord,” he exclaimed, “I wish I had another drink.”

She turned around and her face was radiant. Carr looked at her in amazement. She seemed to have dropped her cloak of fear and thrown around her shoulders a garment that glittered.

“Come on,” she said.

He followed her as if she were some fairy-tale princess—and she did seem to have grown taller—as she went three aisles over, pulled on a light, took down from an upper shelf three copies of
Marius the Epicurean,
stuck her hand into the gap and brought out a fifth of scotch.

His eyes widened. “You certainly do yourself proud.”

She laughed. “Would you really like to see?” And recklessly tumbling down other clutches of books, she showed him a packrat accumulation of hankerchiefs, peanuts and candy, jewelry, cosmetics, even a long golden wig (she held that to her cheek a moment, asking him if he liked blondes), shoes, stockings, dresses, scarves, and all sorts of little boxes and bottles, cups, plates, and glasses.

Taking two of the latter, crystal-bright and long stemmed, she said, “And now will you have a drink with me, prince, in my castle?”

There’s one nice thing about the world being an engine. It gives you something exciting to watch. You can even have some fun with it, kid it a little. But don’t hurt the poor puppets . . .

LIKE TWO drunken pirate stowaways from the hold of a Spanish galleon, tipsily swaying and constantly shushing each other, Carr and Jane went up a narrow stair, groped through the foreign language section, and crossed the library’s unlighted rotunda. Carr’s heart went out to the shadows festooning the vast place. He felt he could fly up to them if he willed, wrap them around him fold on fold. They looked as warm and friendly as the scotch felt inside him.

Then, weaving behind Jane down a broad white stairway, it occurred to him that they might be prince and princess stealing from a marble castle, bound on some dangerous escapade. Here within, all gloom and silent grandeur, save where an unseen guard rattled his pike—say over there, by the elevator, or behind that high glass case. Outside, the city, restless and turbulent, holding wild carnival, but full of rebellious mutterings, “. . . in a nasty mood,” the old Archduke had said, tugging his silvered sideburns. “ ’Twere well your majesties not show yourselves. I have given order to double the palace guard. If only we could set hand on those two young firebrands who raise this malcontent!” Here he knotted his veiny white fist, “The Flame, the girl is called. ’Tis said she bears a likeness to your majesty. Our spies are everywhere, we have set traps at every likely gathering place, but still the two elude us!”

Then, just as the Archduke was launching into his baritone solo, “The awful grandeur of the state strikes terror in men’s souls,” Carr realized that Jane had got through the door to the street. He followed her outside and halted, entranced. For there, beyond the wide sidewalk, was a most fitting continuation of his fantasy—a long low limousine with silvery fittings and softly glowing interior.

Then he saw that it was no pumpkin coach, at least not for himself and Jane, for approaching it at a stately waddle came two well-fed elderly couples, the men in top hats. Under the street lights, the features of all four were screwed up into an expression of germicidal haughtiness. While they were still some yards away, a Negro chauffeur opened the door and touched his visored cap.