TWO
Ten minutes later they were back in Loring's apartment again. David had thought it best to hear the rest of Janice's revelation there. As they entered the large studio living room an oppressive pall seemed to burden the atmosphere; as though they had stepped from the cheerful bustle of the Village street into a place where fear and uncertainty dwelled. David shook off the feeling resolutely; this was his own apartment, and no one dwelled here except himself, and he was a realistic, if somewhat romantic fellow.
They sat down together on the couch which had held them rapturously entwined in one another's arms such a short time ago.
"Now Janice," he said, trying to keep his voice calm and patient, as though he were a doctor dealing with a difficult patient. "You probably had an hallucination. But tell me about this Thing you saw. And remember I am right here beside you."
She spoke with an effort. "I saw it distinctly enough to be sure it was alive and watching me. I saw its face. It was flat, coldly impassive, hideous. No animation in the features at all. The nose was bulbous. Like the nose of an alcoholic. Oh, I know that sounds almost ludicrous, but it's the right description. I can't think of a more accurate one. Its eyes—"
"Go on."
"They were small, dark and smouldering, buried in folds of pinkish flesh. I said no animation, but the eyes were alive, riveted on me as if it were—yes, a ghoul. As if it wanted to pounce on me, sink its teeth in my flesh and suck all the marrow from my bones. There were two little knobby outgrowths protruding from its forehead, one from each temple. They were pinkish too, and if they had been a little longer they would have looked like horns."
"Let me get this straight, Janice. Its face was flat and yet the nose was bulbous. And when the eyes are animated they have a great deal of expression. It makes the other features seem animated too. Aren't there contradictions there?"
"No, I don't think so. Its face did look flat, masklike, despite the bulbous nose and the smouldering eyes. I had the feeling that its features just weren't human—that it was incapable of feeling as we do, thinking as we do. I told you how I felt. It was some kind of monster, despite its almost human body."
"Did you see its hands?"
"That's what terrified me the most, David. I don't think it had hands. Its arms were in shadow, so I couldn't be sure. But I think it had claws. Talons. I didn't wait to make sure. I ran on past it and down the stairs. It made no attempt to follow me."
For an instant Loring sat motionless, shaken in spite of himself, not quite knowing what to believe. Then, quite suddenly, a look of relief came into his eyes. In another moment his expression had changed again. The relief was gone and his eyes were blazing with anger.
"A prank!" he said. "That's what it must have been. All of it, from the moment you saw that lacquered, good-looking joker in your room to the caricature in the hall. Some Village character is having a time for himself, at our expense. Damn him to hell!"
"But David, I told you—"
"Never mind what you think you saw. I know exactly what happened now. It happens often enough, not only in the Village but wherever artists and writers throw parties and allow envious people to drift in. There's always some joker with no talent who wants to get back at people who have talent. Sex can get mixed up in it, too. Someone is making a play for another man's girl, or—"
"You mean you think the whole thing may have been directed at you."
"Quite possibly. At me through you. I wouldn't put it past Jack Durbin." He rose and paced the room, excited by the possibility of a rational answer to the strange tale.
"But it wasn't Durbin I saw in my room. Or anyone we know."
"Naturally! Durbin's looks would eliminate him right off. But he could have talked a friend into helping out with the prank. There are a dozen other people I could nominate for the role. You don't always remember the faces of people you meet casually at parties. You may have been staring into a cocktail glass when the good-looking guy was introduced to you. You may have met him and forgotten all about it."
"I wouldn't forget."
"All right, you wouldn't forget him. So he's new, someone you've never seen before. That doesn't rule out the possibility that he was talked into helping out with the prank by Durbin or someone else. We've attended thirty or forty parties in the last eighteen months. All kinds of people. Beatniks, Madison Avenue gray flannel suiters, painters who have crashed the midtown galleries, piano players, wrestlers, trapeze artists, lads who have been writing the Great American Novel for forty years. You can take your pick. I'll cast my vote for one of the far-out, real gone Beatniks."
"Darling, if I could really believe—"
"Let me finish, Janice. All kinds of people can get erotically compulsive ideas, dangerous and malicious ideas. They become lost to all honor. That's an old-fashioned word, but I've always rather liked it."
"I've no quarrel with it, David. But I can't believe it was all a malicious prank. I just can't reconcile what I saw with any such convenient, easy-to-accept explanation. You've convinced yourself that the figure in the hall was wearing a mask. It was the first thing I thought of, but I couldn't go on believing it."
"Why not? It makes sense."
"Not to me. That creature was real, David. Real and alive and a monster. Not a man disguised by a mask. Its face had a fleshly look."
"But you said yourself that its face was masklike. And modern mechanical masks can be almost unbelievably lifelike. Mask-making has become a fine art. It always was, in a sense, but it's genius-inspired today. I've seen a few of the extraordinary ones—both the Frankenstein monster type and the kind that wouldn't scare a woman if she woke up and saw it beside her on a pillow in the morning. She might even—"
"Don't say it, David, or I'll get angry. I've been holding myself in, but Icanget angry. You've been pressing the jealousy pedal too hard, damaging the sound track, jamming the keys."
"I'm sorry, Janice. It just slipped."
"What are you going to do, David? If you really believe it was just a malicious prank."
"Find him, of course. Find him and take off the mask and flatten his face out so he won't really need a mask to look like a ghoulish monster. That way we'll be helping each other."
"You may end up in jail."
"It will be worth it. Finding him may not be easy, but there's a good chance I'll get my hands on him if I work at it hard enough. I'm going over to your apartment right now, alone. I want you to stay here until I get back. I'll question the neighbors. Someone may have seen him coming or going. I'll describe him and try to locate someone who knows him well, or has seen him often enough to recognize the description. Then I'll go through the halls and your apartment with a fine-tooth comb. He may have left a clue to his identity somewhere about the apartment."
"That seems unlikely, David."
"You never know. Even professional criminals get careless and he isn't a professional. It's surprising how often intruders leave traces somewhere. They get careless and drop something, even a slip of paper with a name or address on it. I know a detective lieutenant who's firmly convinced you have at least a forty percent chance of tracing a criminal intruder if you're thorough enough and explore all of the possibilities."
"All right, David, go ahead. I won't try to stop you. Find out all you can. I think you're wrong. I don't believe it was a prank. I'm sure it was something stranger and more terrifying, something we can't even begin to understand. But I don't want you to blame me later. Although I really can't see what good catching him would do."
"You don't? I should think you'd be the first to understand how I feel."
"I can understand how you feel, David. But what good would knocking him down do? If you're right about its being a prank he's a very sick man. Actually, you ought to have compassion and want to help him."
"I'm afraid I can't be that objective about it. It's a matter of male pride."
"Well, go ahead, indulge your pride, David. I'm not stopping you...."
The parting shot rankled a little as David stood outside the apartment building staring down the long length of MacDougal Street, his eyes alert for a cruising taxi. Simply being angry with her made no sense at all, he told himself. A woman couldn't understand how a man felt when he was caught up in an ugly situation that could only be straightened out in one way if he wanted to go on living with himself.
Being angry made no sense, but he should have explained to her exactly what would happen to his integrity if he shrugged the whole matter off and forgot about it. Emotionally she would never understand, but he should have made a serious effort to at least straighten her out intellectually and correct the impression he'd left with her that he was scientifically moronic and still living in the Middle Ages as far as mental illness was concerned.
The prankster was quite possibly psychotic, or, at the very least, a psychopathic personality. But even so, his integrity demanded that he give the scoundrel at least one sturdy biff in the jaw. After that, he could afford to feel generous and enlightened and drag the man by the scruff of his neck to the nearest mental institution.
A taxi swung to the curb at last and Loring got in and gave the driver Janice's Horatio Street address. He relaxed a little and watched Village stores, restaurants and dry cleaning establishments sweep past the windows of the cab. The almost completely deserted aspect of the Village before ten in the morning never ceased to fascinate him. He didn't quite know why.
Three minutes later, the taxi drew in to the curb in front of a four-story brownstone. Loring paid the driver, climbed the stoop and walked up two flights of stairs to the door of Janice's apartment. He inserted the key she had given him into the lock.
Janice's apartment seemed completely peaceful—quiet and appealing in the early morning light which streamed in from a high window directly opposite the daybed. The covers were in disarray and there was a slipper in the middle of the floor and a small oaken stand had been overturned in her hurry to get away. But otherwise the room was in order and her presence seemed to hover over everything that Loring touched.
He was staring at the slipper when a chill thought crept into his mind, and made his heart stand still. What if she were not alive and safe and waiting for him in the apartment they'd soon be sharing? What if he were a lover returning alone to a house that would never echo to her footsteps again? What if she occupied a narrow home beneath a row of cypresses and he was alone now with only memories to comfort him, or tear cruelly at his heart?
If he were returning alone to such a dwelling, could he bear even to look at the slipper, the unmade bed, all of the dear, precious things her hands had touched?
He remembered suddenly that in the past when he had allowed his mind to dwell even for a moment on some great and inconsolable loss which had never actually taken place he was the better for it—a man more capable of taking full advantage of every moment of joy and happiness in the narrowing orbit of his days. You had to live every moment to the full, with as much heightening of consciousness as you were capable of experiencing, because the orbit started narrowing when you were twenty and never grew any wider even when it stopped narrowing for a time and stayed the way it had been.
In the past such thoughts had not shaken him too profoundly or left a cold chill in their wake. But now they did, somehow. The room felt perceptibly more somber and the chill seemed to spread out from his mind in widening circles to envelop the chairs and bedside table, the bricks of the fireplace and even the pictures on the wall.
He did not hear the door open, though it made a faint click which would have been audible to anyone less preoccupied.
He did not even hear the woman's footsteps approaching him across the room. Her tread was very light and the rug was deep-napped and very soft. But her quick, excited breathing and the heady perfume which was distilling its essence through the room—an odor of jasmine—and the rustle of her dress as she moved quickly made him aware that he was no longer alone.
He turned abruptly and stood staring at her, unable to move or speak, a look of dazed disbelief in his eyes.
He had never seen the woman before. Once seen, her face would have stayed forever in his memory and he could not possibly have forgotten how tormentingly beautiful it was or failed to remember every first-encounter impression, the time, the place, the exact moment when she had ceased to be a stranger.
Her beauty was so overwhelming that it stirred the heart in ways that were dangerous. Instantly, tumultuously, like a drug injected directly into the aorta, tightening the muscle fibers, drawing them together, increasing each pulse beat, turning each beat into a hammer blow in a bursting stillness.