You're All Alone (illustrated) (9 page)

She dropped her hand. “She’s gone,” she said and began to sob.

The old man put his arm around her shoulders. “You’ve scared her off,” he said softly. “But don’t cry, Mother. Tell you what, let’s go sit in the dark for a while. It’ll rest you.” He urged her toward the sunporch. “Jane’ll be back in a moment, I’m sure.”

Just then, behind Carr, the cat hissed and retreated a few steps higher, the vestibule door downstairs was banged open, there were loud footsteps and voices raised in argument.

“I tell you, Hackman, I don’t like it that Dris excused himself tonight.”

“Show some sense, Wilson! This afternoon you didn’t want him to come here at all.”

“Not by himself, no. With us would be different.”

“Pft!
Do you always have to have the two of us in the audience when you chase girls?”

The first voice was cool and jolly, the second brassy. They were those Carr had overheard in the cigarette shop.

Before he had time to weigh his fears or form a plan, Carr had slipped through the door in front of him—Jane’s parents were out of sight—, tiptoed down the hallway leading to the back of the apartment, turned into the first room he came to, and was standing with his cheek to the wall, squinting back the way he had come.

He couldn’t quite see the front door. But in a little while long shadows darkened the calcimine of the hallway.

“I came to check on her first, to chase her second,” he heard Wilson say. “She doesn’t seem to be around.”

“But we just heard the piano and we know she’s a music student.”

“Use your head, Hackman! You know the piano would play whether she was here or not. If it plays when she’s not here, that’s the sort of proof we’re looking for.”

Carr waited for the footsteps or voices of Jane’s parents. Surely they must be aware of the intruders. The sunporch wasn’t that isolated.

Perhaps they were as terrified as he. “She’s probably wandered off to the back of the flat,” Hackman suggested.

“Or hiding there,” Wilson amended. “And there may be photographs. Let’s look.”

CARR WAS already retreating noiselessly across the fussy, old-fashioned bedroom toward where light poured into it from a white-tiled bathroom a short distance away.

“Stop! Listen!” Wilson called. “The sunporch!”

Footsteps receded down the hall, crossed the living room.

“It’s the parents,” he heard Hackman say in the distance. “I don’t see the girl.”

“Yet—listen to that!—they’re talking as if she might be here.”

The footsteps and voices started to come back.

“I told you I didn’t like it when Dris bowed out, Hackman. This makes me more suspicious.” For once the jolliness was absent from Wilson’s voice. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s got in ahead of me and taken the girl somewhere.”

“Dris wouldn’t dare do a thing like that!”

“No?” The jolliness came back into Wilson’s voice, nastily. “Well, if he’s not with her, he’s fooling around with dead girls, you can bet.”

“That’s a dirty lie!” Hackman snarled. “Dris might fool around with dead girls when we’re all having fun together. Naturally. But not by himself, not alone!”

“You think you’re the whole show with him?”

“Yes! You’re just jealous because I dropped you.”

“Ha! I don’t care what Dris—or you—do in your private lives. But if he’s taking chances to cheat with this girl, when he knows that the four men in black hats are hunting for us, he’s endangering us all. And if that’s the case I’ll erase him so fast that—
What’s that?”

Carr stiffened. Looking down he saw that he had knocked over a stupid little porcelain pekinese doorstop. He started for the bathroom door, but he had hardly taken the first painfully, cautious step when he heard, from that direction, the faint sound of movement. He froze, then turned toward the hallway. He heard the stamp of high heels, a throaty exclamation of surprise from Wilson, a softly pattering rush, the paralyzing fighting-squall of a cat, a smash as if a cane or umbrella had been brought down on a table, and Wilson’s, “Damn!”

Next Carr caught a glimpse of Hackman. She had on a pearl gray evening dress, off the shoulders, and a mink wrap over her arm. She was coming down the hall, but she didn’t see him.

At the same moment the cat Gigolo landed in the faultless hair, claws raking. Hackman screamed.

The ensuing battle was too quick for Carr to follow it clearly. Most of it was out of his sight, except for the shadows. Twice more the cane or umbrella smashed down, Wilson and Hackman yelled at each other, the cat squalled.

Then Wilson shouted, “The door!” There was a final whanging blow, followed by, “Damn!”

FOR THE next few moments, only heavy breathing from the hallway, then Hackman’s voice, rising to a vindictive wail, “Bitch! Look what it did to my cheek. Oh, why must there be cats!”

Then Wilson, grimly businesslike: “It’s trapped on the stairs. We can get it.”

Hackman: “This wouldn’t have happened if we’d brought the hound.”

Wilson: “The hound! This afternoon you thought differently. Do you remember what happened the first time you brought the hound here? And do you remember what happened to Dris?”

Hackman: “It was his own fault that he got his hand snapped off. He shouldn’t have teased it. Besides, the hound likes me.”

Wilson: “Yes, I’ve seen him look at you and lick his chops. We’re wasting time, Hackman. You’ll have a lot more than a scratched cheek—or a snapped-off hand—to snivel about if we don’t clear up this mess right away. Come on. To begin with, we’ve got to kill that cat.”

Carr heard footsteps, then the sound of Wilson’s voice growing fainter as he ascended the stairs, calling wheedlingly, “Here, kitty,” and a few moments later Hackman’s joined to with a sugariness that made Carr shake: “Here, kitty, kitty.”

Carr tiptoed across the room and peered through the bathroom door. The white-tiled cubicle was empty, but beyond it he could see another bedroom that was smaller but friendlier. There was a littered dressing table with lamps whose little pink shades were awry. Beside that was a small bookcase overflowing with sheet music piled helter-skelter.

His heart began to pound as he crossed the bathroom’s white tiles.

But there was something strange about the bedroom he was approaching. Despite the lively adolescent disorder, there was a museum feel to it, like some historic room kept just as its illustrious occupant had left it. The novel open face down on the dressing table was last year’s best-seller.

He poked his head through the door. Something moved beside him and he quickly turned his head.

He had only a moment to look before the blackjack struck. But in that instant, before the cap of pain was pulled down over his eyes and ears, blacking out everything, he recognized his assailant.

The cords in the neck stood out, the cheeks were drawn back, exposing the big front teeth like those of a rat. Indeed the whole aspect—watery magnified eyes, low forehead, taut and spindle-limbed figure—was that of a cornered rat.

It was the small dark man with glasses.

I’ve told you to forget the secret, but I’ve got to admit that’s a hard thing to do. Once a mind wakes up, it’s got an itch to know the whole truth . . .

A BLACK sea was churning in front of Carr, but he couldn’t look out into it because there was a row of lights just a little way beyond his feet, so bright that they made his head ache violently. He danced about in pain, flapping his arms. It seemed a degrading thing to be doing, even if he were in pain, so he tried to stop, but he couldn’t.

Eventually his agonized prancing turned him around and he saw behind him a forest of dark shabby trees and between them glimpses of an unconvincing dingy gray sky. Then he whirled a little way farther and saw that Jane was beside him, dancing as madly as he. She still wore her sweater, but her skirt had become short and tight, like a flapper’s, and there were bright pats of rouge on her cheeks. She looked floppy as a French doll.

The pain in his head lessened and he made a violent effort to stop his frantic dancing so he could go over and stop hers, but it was no use. Then for the first time he noticed thin black cords going up from his wrists and knees. He rolled his eyes and saw that there were others going up from his shoulders and head and the small of his back. He followed them up with his eyes and saw that they were attached to a huge wooden cross way up. A giant hand gripped the cross, making it waggle. Above it, filling the roof of the sky, was the ruddy face of Wilson.

Carr looked down quickly. He was thankful the footlights were so bright that he couldn’t see anything of the silent audience.

Then a thin, high screaming started and the cords stopped tugging at him, so that at least he didn’t have to dance. A steady pull on his ear turned his head slowly around, so that he was looking into the forest. The same thing was happening to Jane. The screaming grew and there bounded fantastically from the forest, the cords jerking him higher than his head, the puppet of the small dark man with glasses. His face was carved in an expression of rat-like fear. He fell in a disjointed heap at Carr’s feet and pawed at Carr with his stiff hands. He kept gibbering something Carr couldn’t understand. Every once in a while he would turn and point the way he had come and gibber the louder and scrabble the more frantically at Carr’s chest.

Finally his backward looks became a comically terrified head-wagging and he resumed his flight, bounding off the stage in a single leap.

Carr and Jane continued to stare at the forest.

Then she said, in a high squeaking voice, “Oh save me!” and came tripping over to him and flung her corded arms loosely around his neck and he felt his jaw move on a string through his head and heard a falsetto voice that came from above reply, “I will, my princess.”

Then he pawed around on the ground as if he were hunting for something and she clung to him in a silly way, impeding his efforts. Finally a cord that went up his sleeve pulled a little sword into his hand. Then he saw something coming out of the forest, something that wasn’t nice.

It was a very large hound, colored a little darker slate gray than the sky, with red eyes and a huge tusky jaw.

But what was nasty about it as it came nosing through the trees was that, although there were cords attached to it at the proper points, they were all slack. It reached the edge of the forest and lifted its head and fixed its red eyes on them.

There followed a ridiculous battle in which the hound pretended to attack Carr and Jane, and he flailed about him with his sword. At one point the hound grabbed Jane’s arm in its teeth and he poked at it, but it was all make-believe. Then he made a wilder lunge and the hound turned over on its back and pretended to die, but all the while its red eyes looked at him knowingly.

THEN, AS he and Jane embraced woodenly, the curtain swished down without the least applause from the silent audience, and he and Jane were twitched high into the air. A hand with red-lacquered nails as big as coal-shovels grabbed him and Hackman peered at him so closely that the pores of her skin were like smallpox pits.

“This little one looks as if it might be coming alive,” she rumbled. The nails pinched his arm so” cruelly that it was all he could do not to cry out.

“You’re imagining things,” came Wilson’s voice like distant thunder. “Just like those black hats you thought you saw in the audience. What bothers me is that I can’t find the little sword.”

“Never mind,” Hackman replied, and her breath was like a wind from rotting flowerbeds. “Dris will check on it.”

“Dris!” Wilson boomed contemptuously. “Come on, put the puppet away.”

“Very well,” Hackman said, hanging Carr by his cords to a high hook. “But listen to me, little one,” and she shook

Carr until his teeth rattled. “If you ever come alive, I will give you to the hound!” She let him go. He swung and hit the wall so hard it knocked the breath out of him and he had to fight not to writhe.

With earthquake treadings and creakings, Wilson and Hackman went away. Carr looked cautiously to either side. To his left, a wooden shelf projected from the wall at about the level of his head. To his right Jane hung. Other dangling puppets were dark blobs beyond her.

Then Carr withdrew from his jacket the sword he had hidden there just before the curtain came down, and with it he cut the black cords attached to his knees, then all the others but those fixed to his wrists. He saw that Jane was watching him.