“Tell me, or I’ll come down.” She meant it; the decision was there in her voice.
“Darling,” he said huskily, “I can’t seem to get back upstairs.”
“Are you hurt? Did you fall?”
“I’m not hurt Something’s happened. When I try to come back up …” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I find myself going down.”
“Is—there anything I can do? Won’t you turn toward me? Must you have your back to me?”
Hamilton laughed wildly. “Sure I’ll turn toward you.”
Gripping the railing, he made a cautious about-face— and found himself still facing the gloomy cave of dust and shadows.
“Please,” Marsha begged. “Please turn and look at me.”
Anger surged up in him … impotent fury that could not be expressed. With a baffled curse, he slid to his feet “The hell with you,” he snapped. “The hell with-“
From a long way off came the peal of the door chimes.
“Somebody’s at the door,” Marsha said frantically.
“Well, go let them in.” He was past caring; he had given up.
For a moment Marsha struggled. Then, with a swirl of her skirts, she was gone. The hall light flooded starkly down behind him, casting a long, foreboding shadow into the stairwell His own shadow, elongated and immense …
“Good God,” a voice said, a man’s voice. “What are you doing down there, Jack?”
Peering over his shoulder, he made out the grim, upright figure of Bill Laws. “Help me,” Hamilton said quietly.
“Certainly.” Promptly, Laws turned to Marsha, who had come up beside him. “Stay up here,” he ordered her. “Hold onto something so you won’t fall.” Grabbing her hand, he fastened her fingers around the corner of the wall. “Can you hang on?”
Mutely, Marsha nodded. “I—think so.”
Taking the woman’s other hand, Laws stepped gingerly onto the stairs. Step by step he descended, still holding onto Marsha’s hand. When he had gone as far as possible, he squatted down and reached for Hamilton.
“Can you get hold?” he grunted.
Hamilton, without turning around, held his arm back and stretched with all his strength. He could not see Bill Laws, but he could sense him there, could hear the harsh, rapid breathing of the Negro as he sat perched above him, trying to get hold of his groping fingers.
“No dice,” Laws said dispassionately. “You’re down too far.”
Giving up, Hamilton pulled his aching arm back and settled down on the step.
“Wait where you are,” Laws said. “I’ll be back.” With a series of crashing noises, he bolted back up the stairs to the hallway, dragged Marsha with him, and was gone.
When he returned, he had David Pritchet with him.
“Take hold of Mrs. Hamilton’s hand,” he instructed the boy. “Don’t ask questions; do as I say.”
Gripping the corner of the wall at the top of the stairs, Marsha closed her fingers around the boy’s small hand. Laws herded the boy down the stairs, as far as be could go. Then, taking hold of David’s other hand, he himself descended.
“Here I come,” he grunted. “You ready, Jack?”
Clutching at the railing, Hamilton extended his other hand into the invisibility behind him. Laws’ harsh breathing sounded near by; now he could feel the stairs quake as Laws came lower and lower. Then, incredibly, Laws’ hard, sweat-slippery hand closed around his own. With a furious tug, Laws wrenched him loose from his position at the railing and forcibly dragged him up the stairs.
Panting, gasping, Hamilton and Laws sprawled into the cheery hallway. David scrambled off in fright; Marsha, climbing unsteadily to her feet, reached quickly to take hold of her trembling husband.
“What happened?” Laws demanded, when he could talk. “What was going on down there?”
“I—” He could hardly speak. “I couldn’t get back up. No matter which way I turned.” After a minute he added, “Both ways were down.”
There’s something down there,” Laws said. “I saw it.”
Hamilton nodded. “She was waiting for me.”
“She?”
“That’s where I left her. She was on the stairs when Edith Pritchet abolished her.”
Marsha moaned sharply. “He means the waitress.”
“She’s back,” Hamilton said methodically. “But she’s not a waitress. Not in this world.”
“We can board up the stairwell,” Laws suggested.
“Yes,” Hamilton agreed. “Board it up. Close her off, so the can’t get me.”
“We will,” Laws assured him; both he and Marsha hung tightly onto Hamilton as he stood staring back down into the gloomy, web-ridden depths of the stairwell. “We’ll board it up. We won’t let her get you.”
XIV
“we’ve got to get hold of Miss Reiss,” Hamilton said, as the balance of the group filed up the front walk of the house and into the living room. “And then we’ve got to kill her. Quickly and completely. Without hesitation. As soon as we can physically reach her.”
“She’ll destroy us,” McFeyffe muttered.
“Not all of us. Most of us, maybe.”
“But it would be better,” Laws said.
“Yes,” Hamilton said. “It would be a lot better than sitting here waiting. This world has to come to an end.”
“Does anybody disagree?” Arthur Silvester inquired.
“No,” Marsha said. “Nobody disagrees.”
“How about you, Mrs. Pritchet?” Hamilton asked. “What do you say?”
“Of course she must be put to sleep,” Mrs. Pritchet said. “The poor creature—”
“Poor?”
“This is the world she’s always lived in. This awful, insane world. Imagine it … year after year. A world of predatory horrors.”
Eyes fixed on the boarded-up door to the basement, David Pritchet asked nervously, “Can that thing get up here?”
“No,” Laws told him. “It can’t. It’ll stay down there until it starves. Or until we destroy Miss Reiss.”
“Then we all agree,” Hamilton said with finality. “That’s something, at least. This is one world none of us wants to stay in.”
“All right,” Marsha said, “we’ve decided what we want to do. Now how do we do it?”
“A good question,” Arthur Silvester said. “It’s going to be hard.”
“But not impossible,” Hamilton said. “We succeeded with you; we succeeded with Edith Pritchet.”
“Have you noticed,” Silvester said thoughtfully, “that each time it becomes more difficult? Now we wish we were back in Mrs. Pritchet’s world—”
“And when we were in her world,” McFeyffe finished glumly, “we wished we were back in his.”
“What are you trying to say?” Hamilton demanded uneasily.
“Maybe we’ll wish it again,” Silvester said, “when we get to the next world.”
“The next world should be the real world,” Hamilton said. “Sooner or later we’re going to be out of this rat race.”
“But not yet,” Marsha objected. “There are eight of us, and we’ve only gone through three. Do we have five still ahead?”
“We’ve been in three fantasy worlds,” Hamilton said. “Three closed worlds that don’t touch on reality at any point. Once we’re in them we’re stuck—there’s no way out. So far, we’ve had bad luck.” Thoughtfully, he said, “But I’m not so sure the rest of us live in total fantasies.”
After a moment, Laws said, “You smug sonofabitch,”
“It could be true.”
“Possibly.”
“It includes you.”
“No thanks!”
“You,” Hamilton said, “are neurotic and cynical, but you’re also a realist. So am I. So is Marsha. So is McFeyffe. So is David Pritchet I think we’re almost out of the fantasy realms.”
“What do you mean, Mr. Hamilton?” Mrs. Pritchet asked, troubled. “I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t expect you to
,” Hamilton said. “It isn’t necessary.”
“Interesting,” McFeyffe commented. “You may be right I’ll agree about you and myself and Laws and the boy. But not about Marsha. Sorry, Mrs. Hamilton.”
Pale, Marsha said, “You haven’t forgotten that, have you?”
“That’s my idea of a fantasy world.”
“It’s my idea of a fantasy world, too.” White-lipped, Marsha said, “Your kind of person—”
“What are they talking about?” Laws asked Hamilton.
“It isn’t important,” Hamilton said impatiently.
“Maybe it is. What’s this all about?”
Marsha glanced at her husband. “I’m not afraid to drag it out in the open. McFeyffe has already made an issue of it.”
“We have to make an issue of it,” McFeyffe said soberly. “Our whole lives depend on it”
“Marsha has been accused of being a Communist,” Hamilton explained. “McFeyffe brought up the charges. They’re absurd, of course.”
Laws considered. “This could be serious. I wouldn’t want to wind up in that kind of fantasy.”
“You won’t,” Hamilton assured him.
A cold, bitter grimace touched Laws’ dark face. “You let me down once, Jack.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No,” Laws disagreed, “you were probably right I wouldn’t have liked the smell of perfumed soap very long. But—” He shrugged. “As it stands, you’re wrong as hell. Until we can get ourselves out of this mess—” He broke off. “Let’s forget the past and deal with the here-and-now. There’s plenty of it.”
“One more thing,” Hamilton said. Then we can forget it”
“What’s that?”
Thanks for pulling me up those stairs.”
Fleetingly, Laws smiled. “That’s okay. You sure looked little and sad, crouched down there. I think I would have gone down, even if I couldn’t have got back out.” There wasn’t enough of you, there on that step. Not with what I saw at the bottom.”
* * * * *
Turning toward the kitchen, Marsha said, I’ll put the coffee back on. Does anybody want anything to eat?”
“I’m plenty hungry,” Laws said alertly. “I came directly up from San Jose when the soap factory disappeared.”
“What showed up in its place?” Hamilton asked, as they moved down the hall after Marsha.
“Something I wasn’t able to figure out. Some kind of factory that made instruments. Tongs and pincers, stuff that clamped, like surgical tools. I picked up a couple and took a good look at them but they weren’t really anything.”
“No such product?”
“Not in the real world. It’s probably something Miss Reiss saw at a. distance. Something she never made sense out of.”
“Torture instruments,” Hamilton guessed. “Very possibly. I got the hell out of there, naturally, and grabbed the bus up the peninsula.”
Getting up on a little stepladder, Marsha opened the cupboards over the kitchen sink. “How about some canned peaches?” she asked.
“Fine,” Laws said. “Anything that’s handy.”
As Marsha reached into the cupboard, the can slipped from its stack, rolled forward, and dropped with a sickening crunch on her foot. Gasping with pain, Marsha jumped away. A second can rattled forward, hung on the lip of the cupboard for an instant, and then dropped straight down. Twisting to one side, Marsha barely managed to avoid it
“Close the cupboards,” Hamilton ordered sharply stepping forward. Without using the ladder, he managed to reach up and slam the wooden doors shut. The dull bump of heavy metal cans striking the door was audible. For an interval the sound continued; then, reluctantly, it died.
“Accident,” Mrs. Pritchet said lightly.
“Let’s try to work this out rationally,” Laws said. “It happens all the time.”
“But this isn’t the regular world,” Arthur Silvester pointed out. “This is Miss Reiss’ world.”
“And if this happened to Miss Reiss,” Hamilton agreed, “she wouldn’t think it was an accident,”
“Then it was intentional?” Marsha asked faintly, huddled over and rubbing her injured foot “That can of peaches—”
Hamilton scooped up the can and carried it to the wall opener. “We’ll have to be careful. From now on we’re accident-prone. With a vengeance.”
At the first bite from his dish of canned peaches, Laws made a face and immediately set the dish down on the drainboard. “I see what you mean.”
Warily, Hamilton tasted. Instead of the usual blandness of canned fruit, his tongue was curled by an acrid, metallic taint that made him retch and quickly spit his mouthful into the sink.
“Acid,” he choked.
“Poison,” Laws said calmly. “Well have to be careful of that, too.”
“Maybe we ought to take an inventory,” Mrs. Pritchet said uncomfortably. “We should try to find out how things are acting.”
“Good idea,” Marsha agreed, with a shiver. “So we won’t be surprised.” Painfully, she put her shoe back on and limped over to her husband. “Everything with a life of its own, vicious and hateful, trying to do harm.”
As they were starting back down the hall, the light in the living room quietly winked off. The living room plunged into darkness.
“Well,” Hamilton said mildly, “there’s another accident. Bulb burned out. Who wants to go in and change it?”
Nobody volunteered.
“Well leave it,” Hamilton decided. “It’s not worth it. Tomorrow, when it’s daylight, I’ll take care of it”
“What happens,” Marsha asked, “if they all go out?”
“Good question,” Hamilton admitted. “I can’t answer
it. Then we try like hell, I guess, to find candles. Independent power sources like flashlights, cigarette lighters.”
“The poor insane thing,” Marsha murmured. “Just think— every time there’s a blown-out power line, she sits in the dark waiting for the monsters to descend on her. Thinking, all the time, that it’s part of an elaborate plot”
“Like we’re thinking now,” McFeyffe said sourly.
“But it is,” Laws said. This is her world. Here, when the lights go out—”
In the darkness of the living room the phone began to ring.
“And that, too,” Hamilton said. “What do you suppose she thinks when the phone rings? We better try to figure it out in advance; what does a ringing phone mean to a paranoiac?”
“I suppose it depends on the paranoiac,” Marsha answered. “Obviously, in this case it’s to lure her into the dark living room. So we won’t go.”
They waited. Presently, the phone ceased ringing. The seven of them began to breathe more easily.
“We better stay here in the kitchen,” Laws said, turning around and starting back. “It won’t hurt us; it’s nice and cozy.”
“A sort of fortress,” Hamilton said morbidly.
When Marsha tried to put the second can of peaches into the refrigerator, the door refused to open. She stood holding the can foolishly, plucking at the inoperative handle until her husband came and gently urged her away.
“I’m just nervous,” she murmured. “It’s probably perfectly all right It always sort of stuck.”
“Did anybody turn this toaster on?” Mrs. Pritchet asked. On the little kitchen table the toaster was humming away. “It’s as hot as a stove.”
Hamilton came over and inspected it. After struggling futilely with the thermostat he finally gave up and yanked out the cord. The heating element of the toaster faded into darkness.
“What can we trust?” Mrs. Pritchet asked fearfully.
“Nothing,” Hamilton told her.
“It’s so—grotesque,” Marsha protested.
Thoughtfully, Laws opened the drawer by the sink. “We may need protection.” He began rummaging through the silverware until he found what he wanted, a heavy-handled, steel steak-knife. As his fingers closed around it, Hamilton stepped forward and tugged
his arm away.
“Be careful,” he warned. “Remember the can of peaches.”
“But we need this,” Laws said irritably. Evading Hamilton, he snatched up the knife. I’ve got to have something; you’ve got that damn gun there, bulging out like a brick.”
For an instant the knife lay resting in the palm of his hand. Then, with a determined squirm, it forced itself around, quivering skillfully, and plunged itself directly at the Negro’s stomach. Agilely, Laws eluded it; the knife buried itself in the wooden panel of the sink Quick as a flash, Laws raised his heavy shoe and tramped down on the handle. With a metallic tinkle, the handle broke off, leaving the severed blade embedded in the wood. There it remained, straggling uselessly.
“See?” Hamilton said drily.
Weak and fainting, Mrs. Pritchet sank down on a chair by the table. “Oh dear,” she murmured. “Whatever will we do?” Her voice trailed off in an indistinct moan. “Oh …”
Quickly taking a glass from the drainboard, Marsha reached for the water faucet “I’ll get you a drink of cold water, Mrs. Pritchet”
But the fluid that poured from the tap wasn’t water. It was warm, thick, red blood.
“The house,” Marsha said faintly, shutting off the flow. In the white enamel sink, an ugly pool of blood sluggishly, dribbled reluctantly down the drain. “The house itself is alive.”
“Absolutely,” Hamilton agreed. “And we’re inside it”
* * * * *
“I think we all agree,” Arthur Silvester said, “that we’re going to have to get outdoors. The question is, can we?”
Going to the back door, Hamilton tried the bolt. It was firmly in place; tugging with all his strength he failed to budge it “Not that way,” he answered.
That always stuck,” Marsha said. “Let’s try the front door.”
“But that means going through the living room,” Laws pointed out.
“You have a better suggestion?”
“No,” Laws conceded. “Except that whatever we do, we better do it right away.”
In single file, the seven of them moved cautiously through the dark hall toward the pool of blackness that was the living room. Hamilton led the procession; realization that, after all, it was his house, gave him a measure of courage. Perhaps—a dim hope—he could expect some special dispensation.