You're All Alone (illustrated) (15 page)

And then there was, not a reaction on the part of the crowd, but the ghost of one. A momentary silence fell on Goldie’s Casablanca. Even the’ fat man’s glib phrases slackened and faded, like a phonograph record running down. His pudgy hands hung between chords. While the frozen gestures and expressions of the people at the tables all hinted at words halted on the brink of utterance. And it seemed to Carr, as he stared at Jane, that heads and eyes turned toward the platform, but only sluggishly and with difficulty, as if, dead, they felt a faint, fleeting ripple of life.

And although his mind was hazy with liquor, Carr knew that Jane was showing herself to him alone, that the robot audience were like cattle who turn to look toward a sound, experience some brief sluggish glow of consciousness, and go back to their mindless cud-chewing.

Then all at once the crowd was jabbering again, the fat man was tittering, the blonde was fighting off a madly amorous puppet, and Jane was hurrying between the tables, her arms pressed to her sides to hold up her slip, with snatched-up coat trailing from one hand. As she approached, it seemed to Carr that everything else was melting into her, becoming unimportant.

When’ she’d squeezed past the last table, he grabbed her hand. They didn’t say anything. Their eyes took care of that. He helped her into her coat. As they hurried up the stairs and out the glass door, they heard the fat man’s recitation die away like the chugging of a black greasy engine.

It was five blocks to Carr’s room. The streets were empty. A stiff breeze from the lake had blown the smoke from the sky and the stars glittered down into the trenches between the buildings. The darkness that clung to the brick walls and besieged the street lamps seemed to Carr to be compounded of excitement and terror and desire in a mixture beyond analysis. He and Jane hurried on, holding hands.

THE HALL was dark. He let himself in quietly and they tiptoed up the stairs. Inside his room, he pulled down the shades, switched on the light. A blurred Jane was standing by the door, taking off her coat. For a moment Carr was afraid that he had drunk too much. Then she smiled and her image cleared and he knew be wasn’t too drunk. He almost cried as he put his arms around her.

. . . Afterwards he found himself realizing that he had never felt so delightfully sober in his life. From where he lay he could see Jane in the mirror. She’d put on his dressing gown and was mixing drinks for them.

“Here,” she said, handing him a glass. “To us.”

“To us.” They clinked glasses and drank. She sat down and looked at him.

“Hello, darling,” he said.

“Hello.”

“Feeling all right?” he asked.

“Wonderful.”

“Everything is going to be all right,” he told her.

“Sure.”

“But it really is, Jane,” he insisted. “Eventually we’ll awaken other people, people who won’t go rotten. We’ll find a way of taking care of Hackman and the others. You’ll be able to go back to your place in the pattern. That’ll give you a base of operations. I’ll be able to go back too. And say—” (he suddenly smiled) “—do you realize what that will mean?”

“What?”

“It means that I’ll have a date with you Saturday night, a date in the pattern. I’ve already met you through Tom Elvested and made a date with you. I first thought he was crazy when he introduced me to a Jane Gregg who wasn’t there. But, don’t you see, you were supposed to be there. That was your place in the pattern. Our paths are drawing closer together. We won’t have to go outside the pattern to be together.”

She smiled at him fondly. The telephone rang. Carr answered it. The voice was Marcia’s. She sounded rather drunk.

“ ’Lo, Carr, I thought you should be the first person to hear the news of my engagement to Kirby Fisher.”

Carr didn’t say anything,

“No, really, dear,” Marcia went on after a moment. “We’re announcing it together. He’s right beside me.”

Still Carr said nothing.

“Come here, Kirby,” Marcia called. There was a pause. Then, over the phone, came the smack of a kiss. “Do you believe it now, Carr?” she asked and laughed a little.

“Sorry, but that’s life, darling,” she said a few seconds later.

Another pause. “You had your chance.”

Still another pause. “No, I won’t tell you that. I wouldn’t be interested in your making a scene now.”

A final pause. “Well, then you’ll just have to suffer.”

Click of the receiver.

Carr put his down.

“Who was it?” Jane asked.

“Just a doll jilting me,” he told her, moving toward her.

The world seemed to narrow in like the iris diaphragm of a camera, until it showed only her soft smiling face.

When some guys wake up, they don’t know whether to be decent or mean. They just teeter in the middle. Eventually they jail off, mostly on the mean side . . .

CARR HAS sleepy memories of the phone ringing, of Jane’s voice, of her reassuring touch, of returning darkness. Then came dreams, very bad ones, that seemed to last an eternity. And when, under the spur of an obscure but pressing fear, he fought himself awake, it was as if a legion of demons were opposing his efforts.

The room was dim and swimming, it throbbed with his head, and when he tried to move he found himself weak as a baby. There was a sharp increase in his fear. Fumbling at the sheets, he managed to worm his way to the edge of the bed and roll out. He hardly felt the floor strike him, but the swift movement swirled the air around him and brought him an explanation of his fear.

He smelled gas.

The nearest window looked miles away and seemed to recede as he crawled toward it. When he finally got his chin on the sill, he found it shut. Inching his way upward, leaning against the glass, he got his paper-feeble fingers under the handles, heaved it up, and sprawled out head and shoulders across the sill, sucking the cold clean wind until he’d been sick and his strength began to return. Then he remembered Jane. Returning twice to the window for air, he managed to search the apartment, though his head was still splitting, On the first trip he turned off the gas hissing softly from the ancient wall-fixture and after the third he flung up the other window. A small Chicago gale soon cleaned out the stink.

Jane wasn’t there.

He soused his face with cold water and prepared to think, but just then he heard footsteps in the hall. He stayed inside the bathroom door. The lock grated and the door opened softly and in stepped the small dark man with glasses. His left hand covered his mouth and pinched his nostrils shut. His right was returning a bristling key-ring to his pocket. He moved toward the gas fixture. Then Carr lunged toward him.

At the touch of Carr’s fingers, the small dark man seemed to shrivel inside his clothes and he instantly bleated, “Please, please, don’t! I’ll do anything you say!”

Then, peering back fearfully, he recognized Carr and part of his terror seemed to leave him. But his voice was almost calflike as he continued wildly, “I’ll confess! Only don’t hurt me. I did try to murder you, but now I’m glad you’re alive.”

Carr shook him. “Where’s Jane?” he demanded.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. What have you done with her?”

“I don’t know where she is, I tell you. Oh please don’t hurt me any more. I knew she came here with you last night, because I followed you here from the nightclub. I went off and got drunk again. Then I came back this morning to have it out with you. I let myself into your room with my master keys—”

“And you weren’t planning murder?” Carr interjected sardonically.

“No, no,” the small dark man assured him, his eyes going wide, “It’s just that I don’t like to trouble people. I found only you in bed. I was drunk. My anger that she’d favored you got the better of me. For a moment I hated you terribly and so I turned on the gas and left. But my conscience bothered me and so I hurried back . . .”

“Hours late r,” Carr finished, thumbing at the window. “It’s almost night now. No, I’ll tell you why you came back to turn off the gas. Because you knew that if you didn’t, no one else in the world would—and your kind is careful to tidy up after you.”

THE SMALL dark man looked up at him fearfully. “You know about things then?” he quavered. “She’s told you?”

“About everything,” Carr answered grimly.

The small dark man caught at his sleeves. “Oh, then you’ll understand how lonely I am,” he said piteously. “You’ll understand how much Jane meant to me. You’ll sympathize with me.”

“I’ll beat you to a pulp if you don’t tell me everything you know, quickly. About Hackman, Wilson, Dris—everything.”

“Oh please,” the small dark man implored, his gaze darting wildly around the room. Then a new spasm of terror seemed to grip him, for he began to shake pitiably. “I’ll tell you, I swear I will,” he whined, “Only it’s so cold.”

With an exclamation of contempt Carr went and slammed down the windows. When he turned back the small dark man had moved a few steps away from the gas fixture. But he stopped instantly.

“Go ahead,” Carr said sharply. “The whole story?”

Carr nodded. “Everything that’s important. Everything that might help me find Jane.”

“All right,” the small dark man said. “I think you’ll understand me better then.” And he paused and his eyes went dead and his face seemed to sink in a trifle, as if something behind it had gone far away. His voice too seemed to come from a distance as he said, “It was Hackman who wakened me and took me out of the pattern. It happened in New York. Actually I’d been awake most of my life, but I hadn’t realized that other people weren’t. Hackman lifted me out of a grubby little life and pampered me like a pet monkey and satisfied my every whim, and for a while I gloried in my power and puffed myself up as a little prince, with Wilson my king and Hackman my queen. But then—” (he hesitated) “—it began to get too much for me. It wasn’t that I got tired of living in millionaires’ homes while they were in Florida, or while they weren’t. Or that I got bored with spying on the secretest details of people’s lives and sitting in on the most private conferences of great industrialists and statesmen—though the high and mighty lose their glamor fast when you catch on to the pattern, and the world-shaking incidents become trivial when you know they’re conducted by puppets and that one event means no more than another. No, it was the vicious little impertinences and the outright cruelties that began to sicken me. I don’t mean the dead girls—they were rather lovely, in a heartbreaking sort of way, though Hackman was always jealous and was careful to see I never went with them while I was alone. I mean the business of always slapping people when you were sure you couldn’t be watched, and doing obscene things to them. And slipping plates of food out from under people’s forks and watching them eat air. And watching the puppets write love letters and scrawling obscene comments on them. And that night Hackman got drunk and went down Broadway half undressing the prettier girls and . . .” (he winced) “. . . sticking pins in Chem. Meaningless perhaps, but horrible, like a child throwing pepper in the eyes of a doll.” His voice trailed off to a whisper. “Though there was that child they dropped in the octopus tank at the aquarium—-I really think she was awake. I got so I hated it all. At about that time Hackman wakened Dris and put me in second place, though she and Wilson wouldn’t let me try to awaken a girl of my own. And then I met the four men with black hats.”

HE SHIVERED again. “Please,” he said, “I’m still very cold. Could I have a little drink?”

Carr fetched a bottle from the drawer. When he turned around the small dark man had moved again, though again he stopped instantly. He greedily drank the whiskey Carr poured him. Then he shuddered and closed his eyes.

“The four men with black hats were much worse,” he said softly. “Strangling’s the mildest use to which they put those black silk scarves they wear. They know how to waken others a little—enough to make them seem to feel pain. And they know how to paralyze people—to turn them off. I spotted them at work one day in a playground. That’s how I caught on to them. I didn’t tell Hackman and the others about them, because things were getting much worse between us. She’d taken to setting the hound to watch me and to seize me if I made a move, and then going away for hours with Dris and Wilson. They laughed at me and called me a coward. So I led them out one day and betrayed them to the four men with black hats, knowing that gangs like that would trade a million dead victims for one really live one.

“But my plan didn’t work. There was a fight and the four men with black hats didn’t quite manage to turn the trick, and Hackman and the others escaped. I fled, knowing that now both gangs would be hunting me, for the four men in black hats thought I’d put the finger on them.

“I fled to Chicago, but Hackman and the others followed me. The hound knows my scent although I try to disguise it. I kept away from them and tried to make a life for myself. I fell in love with Jane, but when I had half awakened her I was scared to go further. Then . . .”

The small dark man suddenly stopped dead. He was standing in front of the mantlepiece. He looked at the door. “Listen!” he whispered agitatedly. “What’s that?”

Carr looked back from the door fast enough to see the small dark man whirling back around and stuffing his hand into his pocket. He grabbed the small man’s wrist and jerked the hand out and saw that it held a paper. The small dark man glared at him fearfully, but wouldn’t let go, so he slapped the hand hard. A crumpled paper fell from it. Carr picked it up, and while the small man cringed, sucking his fingers, Carr read the note the small dark man had tried to snatch from the mantlepiece undetected.