The Dark on the Other Side

I

A SHARP, STINGING SCENT PIERCED LINDA’S LUNGS. she struggled, choking. Her face was all wet; cheeks and hands stung as if they had been slapped. Opening reluctant eyes, she saw a face near hers. It was not one of the faces she expected to see, and for a moment it was as unfamiliar as a total stranger’s. A round, florid man’s face, with horn-rimmed glasses and thick, iron-gray hair…Gold. Doctor Gold. Linda’s eyes closed again.

“I’m all right,” she muttered, as the doctor waved the horrible-smelling thing under her nose again. “Don’t…”

“Sure you’re all right,” he agreed smoothly. “Just fainted. Take it easy for a minute.”

He patted her shoulder mechanically and stood up. Gordon must have dragged him away from a quiet evening at home; he was tieless, and pepper-and-salt stubble darkened his heavy jowls. As he moved away from her, Linda saw Andrea at the foot of the couch on which she was lying. The old woman was bent like a priest bowing before the Host; her hands wove patterns in the air and she crooned under her breath. A wave of feeble dislike swept Linda. How could she have had such faith in the old witch? Not that Andrea didn’t-know things. But she hadn’t been much help so far. Her behavior tonight had been maddeningly wrong, evoking hostility instead of sympathy. What on earth did she think she was doing now-summoning her friend’s wandering spirit back into her body?

Her ritual completed, Andrea caught Linda’s eye. She leaned forward over the foot of the couch.

“What was it?” she hissed.

Linda shook her head. Stupid, stupid…she couldn’t talk about it here, Andrea knew that. But sooner or later she would have to tell Andrea about the latest appearance. Whom else could she talk to? No one else would believe her. Andrea only believed because she was half crazy herself.

Her eyes pulled away from the avid demand in the older woman’s gaze. Michael was nowhere in sight; probably he had effaced himself, as any proper visitor would when the hostess was taken ill. Linda wondered where he was. She wondered why she cared-why this one man’s absence from a room could make it feel empty. Especially now, after that unexpected fiasco at the window…

She forced herself to concentrate on the important presences. Gordon and Hank Gold made a significant little group, standing with their backs turned, talking in voices so low she could not make out the words. She didn’t need to hear, she knew what they were saying. Once Gordon had made her visit Gold professionally. The doctor had poked every muscle in her body and taken samples of everything that was detachable. Then he had sat and talked. She had not been in good shape that day; the trend of the conversation had got away from her. Finally she had had to invent an excuse for leaving. It was a flight, rather than departure, and Gold had been well aware of it. After that, she had refused to consult him again; had he not admitted that all her physical tests were normal? But she couldn’t prevent Gordon from inviting his friend and neighbor to dinner occasionally. She couldn’t always excuse herself on the grounds of a headache. She couldn’t keep Gordon from telling him things.

And now-now she would have to fight. If there was the slightest hint, the least admission of what she thought she had seen…Panic twisted her stomach. Michael. Had she spoken to him in the last seconds, gasped out any damning description of the thing that stood glaring outside the window? There was no need to wonder whether he had seen it. No one saw it except she herself. Once, when she was showing Hank Gold the gardens, it had passed through the darkening twilight like a flash of black fog. Turning, at her startled exclamation, he had denied seeing anything except a shadow. That made it all the more important that she should not mention the word now-that deadly, ominous common noun.

The conference ended. They turned and came to her, Gordon first, the doctor following, scratching at his chin.

“Bed for you, baby,” Gordon said, with a forced smile. “Hank says you’ll be fine after a good night’s sleep.”

Linda gathered her wits together.

“Hank probably hates both of us,” she said. “Dragging him out in the middle of the night just because I fainted.”

Gordon’s smile faded.

“I couldn’t get you out of it,” he said. “This can’t go on, Linda. You must agree-”

A hand on his arm stopped him. Gold was smiling, but his eyes gave him away.

“This girl needs rest, Gordon, not a lecture. We’ll discuss it in the morning.”

“Sorry,” Gordon muttered.

“Nothing to be sorry about.” It was farcical, the contrast between Gold’s smile, his casual voice, and his intent, betraying stare. “Here, Linda, pop one of these down. Then off you go. I’ll see you in the morning.”

It appeared as if by legerdemain, a small white capsule lost in the vast pink reaches of his hand.

“What is it?” Linda asked.

“Just a mild sedative. So you can sleep.”

Trapped, Linda looked from the little pill to Gold’s face-pink, smiling and inexorable.

Silently she took the capsule. What was the use?

When she had swallowed it, both men seemed to heave a simultaneous sigh of relief. They expected more of a fight, Linda thought, and derived a faint, grim satisfaction from fooling them even that much. This was right; this was how she had to behave from now on. She had been wrong, before, to struggle openly.

“I’ll carry you,” Gordon said.

She waved him off.

“Up all those stairs? I can walk perfectly well.”

The room wavered as she sat up and Gold came to her assistance. She was glad to lean on the arm he offered. It was better than some of the other possibilities. Now that she was standing, she could see Michael, near the door. She walked slowly toward him, leaning on the doctor’s arm.

It was impossible for her to tell, from his carefully controlled face, what he might have heard-or repeated. But she had to know.

“What made me faint, Hank?” she asked, in a sweet, worried voice.

“I can’t be sure, my dear, until we run a few tests.”

Linda stopped, pulling on his arm.

“But you gave me every test you could think of. You said I was fine.” Her voice rose; with an effort, she got control of herself. “I hate being jabbed with needles,” she said meekly.

“Many people do.” Gold’s chuckle would have deceived most listeners. “My own nurse-would you believe it, I’ve got to give her a tranquilizer before I can take a blood sample. I think you’re very good about it, Linda.”

“But if the other tests were normal-”

“My dear, that was just a routine physical. There are rare diseases and deficiencies that require specific analysis. I may have missed something.”

“Such as what?”

She didn’t look at the doctor; she looked at Michael, now only a few feet away. And she knew.

“My dear child, I can’t possibly speculate. It could be anything from an allergy to a chemical deficiency. Perhaps you can give me the clue-something you ate or drank, something you did today… Come along, now, you ought to be in bed; we’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

The pressure of his arm increased and Linda went with it, no longer resisting. She had found out what she needed to know. During Gold’s final speech, Michael’s eyes had met hers. There must be some truth to this business of ESP, she thought. She had asked, silently; and he had answered, in equal silence.

As she went through the doorway, Michael seemed far away from her. She was tired; so tired she could hardly move her feet. The doctor’s strong arm half lifted her up the stairs. As she went, through the thickening mists of sleep, she heard Gordon speak his guest’s name, and knew that they would be settling down for a long talk as soon as Andrea left. The pill, the damned sleeping pill; she wouldn’t be able to creep downstairs to listen, as she had listened to other conversations. But it didn’t matter. She knew what they would say as well as if she were in the room, invisible and percipient.

II

“Thanks, yes,” Michael said. “I could use a drink.”

Gordon nodded and went to the bar, which was concealed in what had been a Hepplewhite sideboard. Glancing around the room, in the mental equivalent of a man brushing himself off after a crawl through the woods, Michael reorganized his shaken faculties. The secretary, Briggs, wasn’t in the room; that was why Gordon was doing his own bartending. Come to think of it, Briggs had not reappeared after fetching the doctor. The man must have some idea of tact after all.

Andrea was still very much with them, though, and Michael wondered how Gordon planned to get rid of the old woman. The man’s need to talk crackled in the air like electricity, but Michael thought he would not bare his soul in front of the witch. Witch…It wasn’t so hard to believe, seeing Andrea as she looked now. Excitement and the damp night air had loosened her frizzled hair so that it hung in limp locks across her cheeks. Witch locks…another appropriate word whose meaning he had never considered.

“One for the road, Andrea?” Gordon spoke without turning from the bar.

“Subtle as a brick wall,” the old woman cackled. “Forget it, Gordon, I can take a hint without being primed like a pump. I’m going.”

She heaved herself up from the couch in a mammoth flutter of skirts and jangle of beads. She was too good an actress, Michael thought, to leave without a good exit line. Gordon seemed to feel the same way; he turned with a glass in each hand and stood watching Andrea. Andrea did not disappoint them. Drawing herself up to her full height, she thrust out an arm and pointed a fat finger at Gordon.

“You jeered at me tonight, Gordon Randolph, for fighting the powers of darkness. Take care-for They are not mocked. The time may come when you will beg on your knees for the help you despise now. Be sure that I will not deny you.”

She spun on her heel, her skirts belling out like a monstrous purple flower, and stalked toward the door. Michael arranged his facial muscles into a conciliatory smile, but Andrea was not disarmed. She had a parting word for him, too.

“As for you-you are a mocker and a doubter…”

An uncanny transformation came over voice and face, as the first trailed off into silence and the other lost its rigid anger. The old woman’s throat worked hideously as she struggled to speak. When the words finally came, they were shocking because of their softness-faint and whispering, like a child’s voice calling out in the terror of a nightmare.

“Help,” Andrea said. “Please…help…”

Too amazed to move, Michael stood rooted, staring at her, and in another second the act was over. The wrinkled face snapped back into its malevolent expression and Andrea stamped out of the room, leaving a silence that vibrated.

“Whew,” Michael said feebly. “She’s really something, isn’t she?”

Gordon removed himself from the sideboard, against which he had been leaning, and sauntered toward Michael, holding out one of the glasses. The incident, which had shaken Michael, seemed to have removed some of Gordon’s tension. He was clearly amused.

“Sit down and have a drink, in that order. That’s what I love about Andrea. She always provides me with an excuse to have another drink.”

Michael laughed and followed his host’s suggestions.

“How does she get home?” he asked.

He was about to add the obvious witticism, but there was no need; his eyes met Gordon’s and they both grinned.

“Not by broomstick,” Gordon said. “Believe it or not. No, she walks everywhere she goes; the old bitch is as tough as they come. I’d have ordered the car out for her if I hadn’t known, from past experience, that she’d refuse it. With commentary.”

“That I can believe. Why does she dislike you so much?”

“I can think of about ten good reasons,” Gordon said promptly. “Six pathological, three socioeconomic, and one-well, maybe it’s psychotic too.” He tilted his head back and finished his drink in one long swallow, rising as soon as it was gone. “Another?”

“No, thanks.”

Michael contemplated his barely touched glass with some constraint. It was coming now; and he couldn’t refuse to listen. Just as one human being to another, he owed Gordon that much. And as a potential biographer…Maybe the best thing he could do for Gordon was get him started talking.

“She hates you because of Mrs. Randolph.”

“Why not call her Linda?” Gordon came back to the couch and sat down. “You’re a perceptive young man, aren’t you?”

“It doesn’t require much perception to see that.”

“No, you’re right. It sticks out like a sore thumb.” Gordon’s shoulders relaxed as if an invisible burden had been lifted from them. The glance he gave Michael was a compound of apology and relief. “Sorry I said that.”

“I’m not looking for juicy tidbits for a best seller.”

“I know. Thanks.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, and then Gordon sat up straighter.

“Okay. Professionally or otherwise it’s damned good of you to listen to this. Frankly, I’m at my wits’ end. I don’t know what to do-and this is one thing I must do right.”

“I understand.”

“I think you do. You see,” Gordon said, staring down at his glass, “I love her.” He gave a queer, smothered laugh. “The oldest, tritest cliché in the language. From a writer, at that, a man who’s supposed to know something about words. But that’s it. That’s what it comes down to, when you strip away all the verbiage. I love her and I won’t let her go.” “Go?”

“Not physically. Although she has tried…I mean retreat, withdraw into some dark world of her own. That’s what she’s trying to do.”

“Neurotic? Or psychotic?”

“Words, words, words,” Gordon snapped; his suave courtesy had left him, and Michael liked him all the better for it. “A psychiatrist can think up labels. I can’t. But I know, better than anyone else can. She’s pulling away, moving back; and now the world she’s invented is becoming real, for her. She-sees things.”

“Interesting,” Michael said carefully. “How that phrase, which has a perfectly matter-of-fact meaning, can suggest so much that isn’t at all matter-of-fact. I gather you mean she has hallucinations?”

Gordon’s swift glance at his guest was not friendly; but Michael returned it equably, and after a moment the queer empathy between the two men had reestablished itself. Gordon laughed suddenly and leaned back, putting his glass down on the table.

“Thanks again. That’s my greatest danger, I guess-becoming mystical myself. We all do, when catastrophe strikes. What has brought this curse upon me?-that kind of thinking. And it is, to say the least, nonconstructive. Yes, she has hallucinations.”

Michael nodded silently. He was afflicted with an unusual constriction of the brain. Three words. That was all she had said-groaned, rather-just before she slid through his fumbling hands in a genuine faint. But those words, coupled with the similar incident in the grove earlier that day, had told him enough. He was on the verge of repeating his knowledge to Gordon when something made him hesitate. After a moment, Gordon went on,

“The hallucinations are only part of the problem, but to me-and to Hank Gold, whom I’ve consulted-they seem a particularly alarming symptom. It seems to be an animal of some kind that she fancies she sees-a dog, perhaps. Why it should throw her into such a frantic state…”

The black dog.

The words formed themselves in Michael’s mind so clearly that for a moment he thought he had spoken them aloud. He did not; nor did he stop to analyze the reasons for his continued silence on this point. Instead, he said, “It seems to be an animal? Don’t you know?”

Gordon laughed again; this time the sound made Michael wince.

“No, I don’t know. Don’t you understand? Whatever her fear is, I’m part of it. I’m the one she hates, Mike.”

It all came out, then, like a flood from behind a broken dam. Michael sensed that this had been building up for a long time, with no outlet. Now he was the outlet. He listened in silence. Comment would have been unnecessary.

“Linda was barely twenty-one when I met her,” Gordon said. “She was a student, taking the course I taught that one year-you know about that, I suppose. It was an experiment; I thought perhaps teaching might give me something I had failed to find in other pursuits. It didn’t. But it gave me something that meant more.

“She was beautiful. She never knew, nor did any of the clods around her, how beautiful she really was. You can see it still, though it’s contaminated now, faded. What you may not realize is that she was also one of the most brilliant human beings…Oh, hell, that’s the wrong word; why can’t I find the right words when I talk about Linda? Intelligent-yes, surely. Original, creative, one of those rare minds that sees through a problem to its essentials, whether the problem is social, arithmetical, or moral. But there’s an additional quality… Wisdom? Maybe that gives you a clue, even if it’s not quite right. The quality of love. You know how I mean the word-‘And the greatest of these…’I know, I’m making her sound like a saint. She wasn’t. She was still young, crude in some ways, impatient in others, but that quality was there, ready to be developed, drawing…

“It drew me. God, how it drew me! I couldn’t sleep nights. I sat around waiting for that damned class to meet, three days a week, so that I could see her. I had every adolescent symptom you’ve ever heard of, including humility. It took me four months to realize that I didn’t have to wait for class, or skulk around the library and the coffee shop, hoping for a glimpse of her… You aren’t laughing. I wouldn’t blame you if you did. I mean, I wasn’t precisely the greatest lover that ever lived, but I’d had some experience; there’s not another woman alive or dead that I’d have dithered over for four months before I got up nerve enough to ask her to have dinner with me.

“After that,” Gordon said softly, “it went quickly. We were married six weeks later.”

He relapsed into silence, staring dreamily at the fire. Michael said nothing. He knew there was more to come.

“Linda’s background,” Gordon said suddenly. “I suppose, if you follow the current theories, that it accounts for what is happening to her now. I can’t see it myself. Maybe I’m too close.

“Her father was a policeman, just an ordinary run-of-the-mill cop on the beat. He was killed in a gunfight when she was thirteen, shot dead on the spot by a nervous burglar he was trying to arrest. Posthumous medal, citation-and a collection taken up by the appreciative citizens which kept the widow and three orphans eating for about six months.

“It seems fairly clear that her father was the only member of the family with whom Linda had any emotional ties, so his death hit even harder than it would ordinarily hit a girl of that age. Her mother I’ve never met; she remarried and moved to some damned hole like Saskatchewan when Linda was sixteen. Linda refused to invite her to the wedding; she showed me the letter her mother wrote when she read of our engagement in the newspapers. It was fairly sickening, full of effusions about how well her baby had done for her little self, and suggestions as to how she could share the wealth with the rest of the family. Linda threw it in the fire. She must have written her mother; an absence of response wouldn’t be enough to choke off that sort of greedy stupidity. Whatever she said, it was effective. We haven’t heard from the mother-in-law since, nor from the two brothers. One is a merchant seaman, the other is in one of the trades out west-carpenter, plumber, I don’t know what.

“That’s what makes the phenomenon of Linda so hard to believe-that she could have emerged from that mess of normal, grubby people. Her father must have been an unusual person. Or else she’s a throwback to something in the remote family past…you never know. She’s always refused to let me look up her genealogy. Not that it matters, of course, but I was curious, strictly from a scientific point of view.

“So, she loved her father and hated her mother; nice, straightforward Oedipus complex. And she married me because I was a good father figure, older, successful, supportive. Christ, Mike, you don’t need to nod at me; I know all this, I’ve been over it, to myself and with professionals, a dozen times. But the reason why psychiatry fails to satisfy me is because it invents its own data. You act in a particular way because you hate your father. You admit you hate him-fine and dandy. You say you don’t hate him, you really love him? You’re kidding yourself, buddy, because I know better; you wouldn’t be acting this way if you loved him. You hate him. But, in a way, you love him, too, because of that thing called ambivalence. What good is that sort of thing to me, Mike? It gives too many answers.”

He waited. This time he wanted a response.

Michael didn’t know what to say. He never did know, when people talked this way. What do you say to a man who has cut his heart out and put it on the table in front of you? “Nice, well-shaped specimen. There seems to be a hole in it, right here…”

“It doesn’t give simple answers,” he said carefully.

“The question is simple.”

“Is it really?”

“Why does my wife hate me?”

Michael made an impatient movement.

“Any question can be stated in simple terms. ‘Why do men fight wars?’ ‘If we can send a man to the moon, why can’t we solve the problem of poverty?’ ‘God is good; how can He permit evil?’ That sort of simplicity is a semantic trick. You don’t alter the complex structure of the problem by reducing it to basic English.”

Gordon did not reply, and for some minutes the two men sat in silence, listening to the hiss of the dying fire. That sound, and Gordon’s soft breathing, were the only sounds in the room. Michael realized that it must be very late. He was conscious of a deep fatigue-the sodden, futile exhaustion that resulted from wallowing in other people’s emotional troubles. Too much god-damned empathy, he thought sourly. He thought also of the comfortable guest room upstairs, with its nice, soft mattress and its well-placed reading light. But he couldn’t leave, not while Gordon wanted an audience. And there was something else that had to be said.

“Gordon.”

“Hmmm?” Gordon stirred; he looked as if he had come back from a great distance.

“I’m wondering. Whether I should go ahead with this project.”

“What do you mean?” The confessional was closed; Gordon’s dark eyes were searching.

“Probing the emotional problems of a man who’s been dead for a century is one thing. Obviously I can’t lacerate your private emotions in that way. And I’m not sure that I can do anything worthwhile with your life without considering them, not any longer.”

“I wondered too. Whether you’d say that.”

Gordon stood up, stretching like a big cat. Michael noted the smooth play of muscle and the lean lines of his body, and a fleeting thought ran through his mind: I’d hate to tangle with him, even if he is forty.

“Another drink?” Gordon asked.

“No, thanks.”

“I’ll bet you’re beat. You can go to bed in a minute, Mike. I appreciate all this… But first I want to make a confession, and a request.”

“You want me to go ahead with the biography.”

“Yes.”

“And the confession?”

“I hate to admit it, it’s so childish.” Gordon didn’t look embarrassed; hands in his pockets, he stood gazing down at Michael with a faint smile. “But you are a perceptive devil, Mike. I wasn’t aware of this, consciously; but I guess one of the reasons why I allowed this project to get underway was that I hoped you might come up with some burst of insight into my problem. Something I can’t see because I’m too close to it.”

“Something the best professionals can’t see either?”

“I told you my misgivings about psychiatry. And even if the head shrinkers could help, Linda won’t let them. She’s refused even to see a neurologist.”

“You overwhelm me,” Michael said helplessly. He meant it literally; he felt as if Randolph had just dumped a load of bricks on him. He was flattened and breathless under the heap of responsibility. He was also annoyed. It was too much to ask of any man, much less a poor feeble writer.

“No, no, don’t feel that way. I don’t expect a thing. I just…hope. Look, Mike, I understand your scruples and your doubts, completely. Try it. Just try it. Work on the book for a couple of weeks, a month, see how it goes. Then we’ll talk again.”

“Okay.”

Michael stood up. He felt stiff and queasy and in no mood to argue.

“We’ll leave it that way,” he said. “Damn it, Gordon, I can’t help but feel that you’re exaggerating. Your wife doesn’t hate you.”

“No?” They faced one another across the hearthrug. Gordon, hands still in his pockets, rocked gently back and forth as if limbering up for a fight. His eyes were brilliant. “Six months ago she tried to kill me.”

III

Rain fell, heavily enough to keep the windshield wipers busy and make the oily surface of the highway dangerously slick. The weekend drivers were pouring back into the city. Michael had to pay close attention to his driving. A long night’s sleep had left him oddly unrefreshed; he had started out tired, and two hours on one of the nation’s most expensive death traps didn’t exactly help. By the time he reached his apartment he could barely drag himself upstairs. There were four flights of stairs. The old building had no elevator.

After the Randolph mansion, his two rooms and kitchenette should have looked grubby and plebeian, but Michael heaved an involuntary sigh of pleasure at the sight of his worn rugs and tattered upholstery. His desk was overflowing with unfinished work. He had left the dishes in the sink. Even so, the place felt warm and cozy compared to the atmosphere of the big handsome house in the country.

He selected two cans, more or less at random, from the collection on the kitchen shelves, and started to heat up the contents. Napoleon had been and gone; his dish on the floor was empty, but he was nowhere in sight. The kitchen window was open its usual three inches. It still amazed Michael that a cat the size of Napoleon, the scarred, muscled terror of the alleys, could get through an opening that narrow, but he had seen him do it often enough, sometimes with the speed and accuracy of a rocket.

Once he had tried shutting Napoleon in the apartment while he was away for the weekend. Napoleon had expressed his opinion of that with his usual economy of effort; he had left neat piles of the said opinions every few feet down the hall, through the living room, culminating, in the most impressive pile of all, in the center of Michael’s unmade bed. Michael hadn’t even bothered to speak to him about it. He was only grateful to Napoleon for skipping his desk. After that he left the window slightly open and took his chances with burglars. A closed window wouldn’t deter anyone who really wanted to get in. There wasn’t anything in the place worth stealing anyhow.

When the soup was hot, he carried the pan into the living room and sat down, putting his feet up on the coffee table, which bore the marks of other such moments of relaxation. He ate out of the pan, remembering, with a wry smile, the smooth, unobtrusive service of the breakfast he had eaten that morning, complete with butler and antique silver chafing dishes. Then his smile faded into an even wrier frown, as the thoughts he had successfully avoided all day forced their way into his consciousness.

Gordon Randolph had excelled at half a dozen different careers. Michael wondered why he had never gone on the stage. He had an actor’s instinct for a good, punchy line of dialogue.

Then Michael shook his head, as his habitual sense of fairness reproached him. Gordon didn’t have to dramatize the situation. It was theatrical enough. And he, Michael, had provoked that simple, shocking punch line. He had more or less set it up. Nobody could resist a line like that one.

“Six months ago she tried to kill me.”

The man has guts, Michael thought. He’s still there-not only in the same house, but right in the next room.

Gordon’s description of that incredible event hadn’t been theatrical at all; if anything, it had been understated. But Michael’s writer’s imagination had not required any details. He could picture it only too vividly: to wake from a sound sleep to see, standing over you, a figure out of a nightmare-or out of a Greek tragedy, a figure with the terrifying beauty and malignancy of Medea, arm upraised, knife poised to strike-and to know that the would-be killer was your own adored wife… No wonder primitive people had believed in demoniacal possession.

Because he had the muscles of an athlete and the quickness of a cat, Randolph had survived the encounter, but he still bore the mark of it, a long, puckered scar along his forearm. Michael’s insistent imagination presented him with another picture that was even worse than the first. To wrestle for your very life with some Thing that had the cunning and strength of the insane, and yet the familiar soft body of the woman you loved; held back by fear of hurting the beloved, but knowing that if you failed to hold her, the Other would have your life. Demoniac possession? God, yes, surely that was how you would think of it, despite the centuries of rational skepticism that had supposedly killed that superstition.

The soup on the bottom of the pan was scorched. Michael’s food always was; he cooked everything at top heat. He ate absently, without noticing the taste. There was a bad taste in his mouth anyhow. That house-that sick, evil house…

He paused, the spoon dripping unnoticed onto his knee, as his mind grappled with this new and absorbing notion. Evil. Now why had he thought of that word? It was a concept he avoided because it was at once too simple and too complex-meaningless, he would have said once. And yet, during that whole weekend, the word had come up again and again. They had all used it, talked about it.

A thud and then a clatter came from the dark kitchen, and Michael jumped and swore as he noticed the puddle of soup on his trouser leg. He put the spoon back into the pan and swabbed ineffectually at the spot with his hand. That only made it worse. Then he looked up, glaring, as the pad of heavy paws announced the arrival of Napoleon.

The cat stood in the doorway, returning Michael’s glare with interest. He was an enormous animal, as big as a small dog, and uglier than any dog Michael had ever met. His ancestry must have included cats of every color, for his fur was a hideous blend of every hue permitted to felines-orange, black, brown, white, gray, yellow, in incoherent patches. Now he looked leprous, having lost a good deal of fur in his encounters with other tomcats. One ear was pretty well gone, and a scar on one side of his whiskered countenance had fixed his jaws into a permanent maniacal grin. From the glow in his yellow eyes, Michael deduced that he had just returned from another victory. After a moment, Napoleon nodded to himself, sat down, lifted his back leg into an impossible position, and began licking his flank.

“Don’t bleed on the rug,” Michael said automatically.

Napoleon looked up from his first aid, gave Michael a contemptuous stare, and returned to his labors. Michael returned to his thoughts, which were considerably less pleasant than Napoleon’s.

Homicidal mania. They didn’t call it that nowadays, did they? Paranoia? Schizophrenia? He shook his head disgustedly. Gordon was right: words, words, words. They meant nothing to a man whose wife had tried to kill him.

Evil. Another word, but it was a word rooted deep in human experience; it satisfied the demand for understanding more than did the artificial composites of a new discipline. It had the solid backing of centuries of emotional connotations. It brought back references from every literary source from Holy Writ to Fu Manchu. Out of this accumulation of literary and racial memory, one quotation came to Michael’s mind:

By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something evil this way comes.

Nobody ever expressed an idea quite as aptly as Shakespeare. But in this case the evil was not approaching. It was already there-in that house.

Napoleon finished his ablutions and stalked over to lean heavily on Michael’s leg. It was his only means of expressing an emotion, which Michael, in his softer moments, liked to interpret as affection. Someone had once said of that hard-bitten monarch, Henry VII, that he was not, to put it mildly, uxorious. In the same vein of irony one might say of Napoleon that he was not a lap cat. He did lean, occasionally, and his weight being what it was, the effect was noticeable. Michael got up with a weary sigh and extracted a can of cat food from the supply on the shelf. Affection? Gluttony, rather. Napoleon applied himself to supper with uncouth gulps, and Michael wandered back to the couch.

Not even the cat, for whom he felt a sneaking fondness compounded with envy, could distract him from the black current of his thoughts. How the hell could he write a biography of a man who was as hag-ridden as Gordon Randolph without tearing the man’s soul to bloody shreds? Especially if he went on in this vein of half-baked mysticism. Evil deeds, evil men, he had said-but Evil, in the abstract? If there was evil in the beautiful house, it had to emanate from some living individual.

There weren’t that many candidates. The revolting old woman, Andrea, was one of them; she was a constant visitor, and she was crazy as a loon. Michael wondered how genuine her belief in witchcraft was. Ninety-nine percent, he thought. What other hang-ups did she have? Certainly the old woman’s blend of malice and superstition was not a healthy influence; but how profoundly had it really affected Linda Randolph? Had Andrea implanted her own insane ideas, or merely strengthened neuroses that had already begun to form? Even insanity has its own brand of logic. The paranoid schizophrenic may kill a complete stranger, suddenly and seemingly without cause; but in terms of the murderer’s delusion, his action makes perfectly good sense. As the object of a widespread conspiracy aimed at his life and reason, he is only acting in self-defense when he kills one of the conspirators. Was that why Linda had attacked her husband? Could such a delusion have been planted by a third party-such as Andrea?

Then there was Briggs, the fat little man who looked like a moribund pig. Physiognomy was not a science. Under his pale, pudgy façade, Briggs might have the soul of a saint. But Michael doubted it. Briggs’s feelings toward the Randolphs were obvious. He idolized his employer and resented-because he desired-his employer’s wife. Which was natural. Randolph had been modestly vague about the circumstances that had brought Briggs to his present post, but Michael had got the impression of persecution, a miscarriage of justice, the loss of a profession for which the man had prepared all his life. Briggs wasn’t the type to square his shoulders and march back out into the arena after someone had kicked him where it hurt. Randolph ’s offer of a job might, literally, have saved his life. No wonder the little man admired his boss. His attitude toward Linda was equally comprehensible, if less attractive. Malice-plenty of it. Michael wondered whether Gordon was too damned high-minded to see how his secretary felt about his beautiful wife. But Briggs’s brand of feeble frustration was not evil, not in the sense Michael meant.

Randolph? Michael dismissed that hypothesis not because of Randolph ’s charm and talent but because of a fact that stood as solidly as Mount Everest. Randolph was genuinely, desperately, in love with his wife. Although Michael had interviewed a lot of people, he couldn’t always tell the truth from the assumed; but in this case he would have staked his reputation on the genuineness of Randolph ’s feelings.

All of which led straight back to the most obvious source of evil. Linda herself.

Now, there, surely, he was out of his depth and could candidly admit the fact. God damn it, he wasn’t a psychiatrist. Nobody but a professional had the right to speculate about a mental condition as severe as Linda’s. He couldn’t even consult a professional. It would be an unforgivable violation of friendship.

But the idea remained, dangling like a shiny toy in the forefront of his mind, and for a few minutes he played with it. Often in his biographical research he had talked to Galen Rosenberg about the personalities of his subjects. Rosenberg had been one of his father’s best friends, and Michael would have appreciated his pithy comments even if he had not been one of the top psychiatrists in the east. His humility and his sardonic sense of humor were as great as his all-embracing tolerance. It was a pity Gordon couldn’t convince his wife to see Galen. If anyone could help her…

Michael shook his head. He was busy-bodying again, and if he had learned anything in the course of his thirty-three years, it was the futility of trying to force help on people who didn’t want it. No, he couldn’t discuss the case with Galen, not even under pseudonyms. His problem was not Linda’s neuroses, it was a question of his own professional competence. Could he do a decent job with Randolph ’s life without mentioning the fact that Randolph ’s wife had tried to kill him? Another of those simple questions that weren’t simple at all.

The answer, like the question, could be phrased with paradoxical simplicity. Michael realized, with a slight shock, that the answer was not the one he had hoped to get. He was a professional, and a good one; on that theme he had no false modesty whatever. Already sentences were framing themselves in his mind, possible lines of investigation were taking shape; the subject fascinated him as a problem, all personal ties aside. Oh, sure, there would be sticky moments, places were he would have to walk carefully, but they were only part of the challenge of the job. He could do it, all right. And he wanted to do it. And he didn’t want to do it.

Michael bounded to his feet with a snarl, knocking two issues of Mad, an American Historical Review, and approximately two weeks of the New York Times off the coffee table, and evoking an answering growl from Napoleon, who was crouched on the rug by the front door. It was his favorite place. What he was waiting for, Michael never knew, though he wasted a lot of time speculating. Other cats? Not people. Napoleon hated people, all people, and departed via the window whenever a visitor approached.

“Why the hell I don’t get a nice friendly dog, I don’t know,” Michael said aloud. “I could talk to it and get an answer now and then. I can’t even kick you to relieve my spleen. You’d wait till I was asleep and then come in and tear my throat out. Who do you think you are, squatting there by the door? A watchdog? A lion? A vulture? God damn it, I hope that old saw about animals reflecting the personalities of their owners isn’t true. You make me look like some kind of nut.”

Having thus relieved his spleen, he stalked toward the bedroom, shedding coat, tie, and shirt as he went. Napoleon settled back on his haunches muttering to himself. The eerie sound followed Michael all the way into the bedroom, and he kicked the dresser in passing. Why couldn’t the cat purr like an ordinary feline? This sound wasn’t quite a growl, but it certainly wasn’t a purr; Napoleon never expressed approval in that traditional fashion. He never expressed approval at all. He just sat around muttering to himself. A helluva pet for a poor miserable bachelor…

No pets. No animals at all, on the whole expansive twenty acres of Randolph ’s estate. Surely that was not coincidental. You’d expect a man like Randolph to ride and hunt, to keep dogs.

Michael turned out the light and pulled the crumpled sheet up to his chin. He liked to consider himself above such considerations as physical comfort, but his uncooperative body remembered the smoothness of the sheets at the Randolph house, and the yielding yet firm surface of the mattress. Surely this mattress had grown another lump since the last time he slept on it. He wriggled, trying to find a smooth spot. No use. The damned mattress grew tumors, like protoplasm…

There was no clue to Randolph ’s personality in the absence of animals; that was a pretty corny old cliché. A lot of nice people didn’t like dogs. There were such things as allergies, too. And…of course. Linda Randolph’s neurosis had to do with animals. Randolph couldn’t have a dog on the place when the sight of an imaginary one sent his wife into fits. So much for the subtle analytical biographer’s insight.

Michael gave up his search for comfort and lay staring up at the ceiling, hands clasped under his head. The dirty yellow light from the street filtered in through panes grimy with city dirt, past the cracks in the wooden slats of the ancient blind. Sounds filtered in, too-the soft drizzle of the rain and the hooting, honking blare of traffic. Even at this late hour there were cars on the city streets. Soon the trucks would begin their nightly deliveries, but he wouldn’t hear them; his ears had become inured to the grind of brakes and the vibration that was gradually eroding the fabric of buildings and pavements. He was used to the sounds and the grime and the press of human beings. They were part of his habits; without them he probably couldn’t work. Yearning for apple blossoms and fresh country air and crocuses (crocuses?) pushing their tender green tips through the damp brown earth-sentimental nonsense, that was what it was. A nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Soothed and comforted by the familiar cacophony and the friendly dirt, he was drifting off to sleep when he remembered something else. He hadn’t paid much attention at the time to Randolph ’s remark; he had been tired and confused, and the remark hadn’t made any sense anyhow. Now he remembered it, and the utter illogic of it brought him out of his doze, wide awake and staring.

“If she should come to you,” Randolph had said, “try to get her to see a doctor. Maybe you can do it.”

Had Gordon Randolph really said that? Of all the weird, crazy things to say…And he had simply nodded and muttered, “Sure, of course; be glad to.”

Michael groaned aloud. What had he got himself into this time? What kind of tacit admission could be read into that acquiescing mumble of his? He was always doing things like that, agreeing to propositions without listening to them, letting his mind wander off into byways and returning to a conversation to find that he had committed himself to ideas he violently opposed or plans that he had no intention of carrying out. But this was his worst fiasco yet. Did Randolph really think…?

Of course there had been those two episodes. When a man walks into a room and finds his wife in another man’s arms, he may be excused for thinking there is something between them. Was Linda Randolph a nymphomaniac as well as an alcoholic?

Michael groaned again, so heartily that it provoked a loud response from Napoleon, out by the front door; but at the same moment he denied the thought. He had spotted Linda as a heavy drinker the first time he saw her. The symptoms of the other were just as obvious, and she wasn’t…No, indeed, she wasn’t. His face burned, in the darkness, as he remembered the strength with which she had held him off.

So, all right, he told his wounded male ego-so you made a mistake. You got carried away. Perfectly natural. But the girl really was sick, she had passed out cold.

“If she should come to you…”

Damn it, why didn’t he listen to what people said? He should have rejected the preposterous suggestion. He shouldn’t have seemed to accept any such possibility.

Then the most disturbing thought of all forced its way into his reluctant mind. Had he failed to deny the proposition because, in reality, it had not seemed so incredible? Did he, unconsciously, want Randolph ’s wife to seek him out-for help, for anything? He pushed the idea away, outraged; but it came back. If a desire was really unconscious, he wouldn’t know it himself. If he really wanted…

“Oh, damn it,” Michael said helplessly. There was only one thing to do with an idea like that one. He turned over and went to sleep.