You're All Alone (illustrated) (17 page)

“What do you know about John Claire Beddoes?” she asked him.

“Just the usual stuff,” Carr replied. “Fabulously wealthy. Typical Victorian patriarch, but with vague hints of vice. Something about a mistress he somehow kept here in spite of his wife.”

Jane nodded. “That’s all I knew when I first came here.”

The musty odor with a hint of water-rot grew stronger. Even their cautious footsteps raised from the tattered but heavily padded stair carpet puffs of dust which mounted like ghostly heads into the flashlight’s beam.

“In spite of everything he did to us,” Carr said, “I almost hate leaving your friend like that.”

“He can’t go on betraying people for ever,” Jane said simply. “One of the reasons I brought you here is that he doesn’t know about this place.” They reached the second-story landing and a door that was a mere eight feet high. It opened quietly when Jane pushed it. “I’ve oiled things a bit,” she explained to Carr.

Inside the flashlight revealed a long dark-papered room with heavy black molding ornamented with a series of grooves that were long and very deeply cut, especially those in a picture rail that circled the room a foot from the ceiling. Round about were old-fashioned bureaus and chests and other furniture so ponderous that Carr felt it would take dynamite to budge them. While at the far end of the room and dominating it was a huge grim bed with dark posts almost as thick as the angel downstairs.

“Behold the unutterably respectable marital couch of the Beddoes,” Jane proclaimed with a hint of poetry and laughter. Then she entered one of the alcoves flanking the head of the bed, laid the flashlight on the floor, and fumbled at the wide baseboard until she’d found what she was looking for. Then, still crouching there, she turned to the mystified Carr a face that, half illuminated by the flashlight’s beam, was lively with mischief.

“To get the biggest kick out of this,” she said, “you must imagine John Beddoes waiting until his wife was snoring delicately and then quietly getting up in his long white nightgown and tasseled nightcap—remember he had a big black beard—and majestically striding over here barefooted and . . . doing just this.”

WITH THE words, Jane rose, not letting go of the baseboard. A section of the wall rose with her, making a dark rectangular doorway. She picked up the flashlight and waved Carr on with it.

“Enter the secret temple of delight,” she said.

Carr followed her through the dark doorway. She immediately turned around, lowered the secret panel behind them, arid switched off the flashlight.

“Stand still for a moment,” she said.

He heard her moving around beside him and fumbling with something. Then came the scratch of a match, a whiff of burning kerosene, and the next moment a gold-bellied, crystal-chimnied lamp at his elbow was shedding its warm light on scarlet walls and scarcely tarnished gilt woodwork.

“The place is so sealed up,” Jane explained, “that there’s hardly any dust, even after all these years. There’s some sort of ventilation system, but I’ve never figured it out.”

The room that Carr found himself looking at with wonder was furnished with lurid opulence. There were two gilt cupboards and a long side-board covered with silver dining ware, including silver casseroles with spirit lamps and crystal decanters with silver wine-tags hanging around their necks. Some of the silver was inset with gold. Toward the end of the room away from the secret panel was a fragile-looking tea-cart and an S-shaped love seat finished in gilt and scarlet plush. The whole room was quite narrow and rather less than half the length of the bedroom.

Jane took up the lamp and moved beyond the love seat. “You haven’t seen anything yet,” she assured Carr with a smile. Then kneeling by the far wall, she drew up a narrow section which disappeared smoothly behind the gilt molding overhead.

“They’re counterweighed,” she explained to Carr and then stepped through the opening she had revealed. “Don’t trip,” she called back. “It’s two steps up.”

He followed her into a second room that was also windowless and about the same shape as the first and that continued the same scheme of decoration, except that here the furnishings were a gilt wardrobe, a littered gilt vanity table with a huge mirror in a filagreed gilt frame suspended on scarlet ropes with golden tassels, and a bed with a golden canopy and a scarlet plush coverlet. Jane pulled off her blonde wig and tossed it there.

“And now,” she said, turning, “let me introduce you to the girl herself.” And she lifted the lamp so that it illumined a large oval portrait above the wardrobe. It showed the head and shoulders of a dark-haired and rather tragic-eyed girl who seemed hardly more than seventeen. She was wearing a filmy negligee.

“She looks rather pale,” Carr observed after a few moments.

“She should,” Jane said softly. “They say he kept her here for ten years, though that may have been an exaggeration.”

Carr walked on and looked through the archway in which the room ended. It led to a bathroom with gold, or gilded fixtures, including an ancient four-legged tub whose sides, fluted like a seashell, rose almost to shoulder height and were approached by little steps.

“Go on, look in,” Jane told Carr as he hesitated in front of it. “There’s no slim skeleton inside, I’m happy to report.”

Before returning, Carr noted that all the fixtures were, though old-fashioned, so shaped that the water would swirl in and out silently.

JANE WAS fumbling with a gilt molding that ran along the wall at eye level. Suddenly it swung out and down along its length and hung there on hinges, revealing a black slit in the wall that ran the length of the room and was about an inch wide.

“It opens into one of the grooves in the picture molding in the Beddoes bedroom,” Jane explained. “Our being two steps higher makes the difference. If there were a light in there and we turned out our light, we’d have a good view of the place. I suppose John Claire used it to make sure his wife was asleep before he returned. And his young friend could have used it to spy on her lover and his lawful mate, if she were so minded.”

Suddenly the cruel and barren possessiveness of the place and the terrible loneliness of the machinations of these long-dead puppets caught at Carr’s heart. He put his arm around Jane and swung her away from the black slit.

“We’ll never leave each other, never,” he whispered to her passionately.

“Never,” she breathed.

They looked at themselves curiously in the mirror they now faced. Their images peered back at them through a speckling of tarnish. With an uneasy laugh Carr went up to the vanity table and on an impulse pulled open the shallow center drawer.

There lay before him a small, single-barreled pistol, pearl-handled, gold chased. He picked it up and looked at the verdigreed rim of the lone cartridge.

“All the appurtenancies of a romantic
fin de siecle
lady of pleasure,” he observed lightly. “Apparently never used it, though. I wonder if it was supposed to have been for herself or him, or the wife. The powder’s as dead as they are, I’ll bet.”

Jane came to his side and pointed out to him, amid the jumble of objects on the vanity, two blank-paged notebooks bound in red morocco and two heavy gold automatic pencils with thick leads. Most of the pages in each notebook had been torn out.

“I imagine they used those to talk together,” she commented. “He probably had a strict rule that she must never utter a single word or make a single sound.” She paused and added uncomfortably, “You’re bound to think of them as having been alive, aren’t you, even when you know they were just robots.”

Carr nodded. “No music . . . he murmured, fingering through the other objects on the vanity. “Here’s one way she passed the time, though.” And he pointed to some drawing paper and sticks of pastel chalk. A yellow one lay apart from the others. Jane flicked it back among the rest with a shudder.

“What’s the matter?” Carr asked. “Something my friend told me,” she said uncomfortably. “That Hackman and Wilson and Dris use yellow chalk to mark places they want to remember. Something like tramps’ signs. Their special mark is a cross with dots between the arms.”

CARR FELT himself begin to tremble. “Jane,” he said, putting his arm around her. “On one of the pillars of the gate in front of this place, above a ledge too high for you to see over, I saw such a mark.”

At that moment they heard a faint and muffled baying.

Jane whirled out of his arms, ran and lowered the panel between the rooms, came back and blew out the lamp. They stood clinging together in the darkness, their eyes near the long slit.

They heard a padding and a scratching and a panting that gradually grew louder. Then footsteps and muttered words. A snarl that was instantly cut off. Then a light began to bob through the bedroom doorway. It grew brighter, until they could see almost all of the bedroom through the crack with its tangled edging of dust and lint.

“Watch out,” they heard Wilson call warningly from beyond the door. “They may try something.”

“I only hope they do,” they heard Hackman reply happily. “Oh how I hope they do!”

And then through the bedroom door the hound came snuffing. It was larger even than Carr had imagined, larger than any Great Dane or Newfoundland he’d ever seen, and its jaws were bigger, and its eyes burned like red coals in its short, ash-colored hair. He felt Jane shaking in his arms.

Hackman walked at its side, her eyes searching the room, bending a little, holding it on a short leash. There was a sticking plaster on her cheek where Gigolo had scratched her.

“Don’t hurry, Daisy,” she reproved sweetly. “There’ll be lots of time.”

Wilson and Dris entered behind her, carrying gasoline lanterns that glared whitely. Wilson put his down near the door. Dris, hurrying, stumbled into him with a curse.

Meanwhile Hackman and the hound had gone almost out of sight in the alcove. Suddenly she cried out, “Daisy, you stupid dog! What are you up to?”

Wilson, about to rebuke Dris, turned hurriedly. “Don’t let him hurt the girl!” he cried anxiously. “The girl’s mine.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, you fat-bellied hasbeen!” Dris snarled suddenly. “I’ve played second fiddle to you long enough. This time the girl’s mine.” And he hurried past Wilson with his light. Wilson grew purple-faced with rage and tugged at something in his pocket.

“Stop it, both of you!” Hackman had returned a few steps, the hound beside her. They both did. Hackman looked back and forth between them. “There’ll be no more ridiculous quarreling,” she told them. “The girl’s mine, isn’t she, Daisy?” And she patted the hound, without taking her eyes off them. After a few seconds Wilsons face began to lose its unnatural color and Dris’ taut frame relaxed. “That’s good,” Hackman commented. “It’s much the simplest way. And you won’t lose your fun. I promise you you’ll find it quite enjoyable. Now come on back, Daisy. I think I understand what you were trying to show me.” Once again she went almost out of sight, Wilson following her and Dris carrying the lamp.

“Where is it now?” Carr and Jane heard Hackman ask. There came a sound of eager scratching and snuffing. “Oh yes, I think I get it now. Let’s see, one of these circles in the baseboard should press in and give me a fingerhold. Yes. . . yes. Now if I pressed them both together . . .”

Jane and Carr suddenly heard the voices coming more plainly through the wall between the hidden room than from the bedroom. And the next moment they heard the hound snuffing and scratching at the second secret panel.

“Another one, is there?” they heard Hackman say. “Well, it won’t take long.” Then she raised her voice in a shout. “Yoohoo, in there! Are you enjoying this?”

CARR TOOK the single-shot pistol from his pocket. Its fifty-year-old cartridge was a miserable hope, though their only one.

But just then there came a new sound—the sound of footsteps, on the stairs, growing louder, louder, louder. Dris, who, judging from the position of the light, had stayed in the alcove doorway, must have heard it too, for he called out something to the others.

“Stay there!” Hackman hissed at the hound. “Watch!”

Then the three of them ran back into the bedroom, just as there sprinted into it the small dark man with glasses, his flying feet raising a puff of dust at each step.

He was past them before he could stop. Wilson and Dris circled in behind him, cutting off his retreat. Panting, he looked around from face to stonily-glaring face. Suddenly he laughed wildly.

“You’re dead!” he squealed at them shrilly. “You’re all dead!”

“This is a long-anticipated entertainment, darling,” Hackman told him. She looked beautiful as she smiled. Then the three of them began to close in.

The satisfaction in the small dark man’s expression was suddenly veiled by terror. He started to back away toward the alcove. “You called me a coward,” he screamed at them wildly. “But I’m not. I’ve killed you, do you hear, I’ve killed you.”

But he continued to back away as the others closed in.

“Run rabbit!” Hackman cried at him suddenly, and they darted forward. The small dark man whirled around and darted into the alcove. “Now, Daisy!” Hackman shrieked. There was a terrible snarl from the panel, and a thud, and a threshing sound and series of long high screams of agony. In between the screams Carr and Jane could hear Hackman yelling, “Oh, that’s lovely, lovely! Get out of my way, Dris, I can’t see. That’s it, Daisy! Beautiful, beautiful! Hold up the light, Dris. Oh good, good dog!”