The 27th Golden Age of Science Fiction Page 7

  “Now the supreme glory of evil!” he was muttering in her ear. She felt his hands on her bare shoulders as he pressed her backward.

  Then, abruptly, he paused, releasing her. She sat dizzily erect, following the direction of his gaze. In the half open door stood the nondescript bartender leering in at them.

  CHAPTER 10

  Rescue from Abaddon

  Pat slid dizzily from her perch on the table and sank heavily to a chair. The interruption of the mustached keeper of this den of contradictions struck her as extremely humorous; she giggled hysterically as her wavering gaze perceived the consternation in his sharp little face. Some forlorn shred of modesty asserted itself, and she dragged a corner of the red-checked table cloth across her knees.

  “Get out!” said Nicholas Devine in that voice of rasping metal. “Get out!” he repeated in unchanging tones.

  The other made no move to leave. “Yeah?” he said. “Listen, Bud—this place is respectable, see? You want to pull something like this, you go upstairs, see? And pay for your room.”

  “Get out!” There was no variation in the voice.

  “You get out! The both of you, see?”

  Nicholas Devine stepped slowly toward him; his back, as he advanced upon the bartender, was toward Pat, yet through the haze of intoxication, she had an impression of evil red eyes in a chill, impassive face. “Get out!”

  The other had no stomach for such an adversary. He backed out of the door, closing it as he vanished. His voice floated in from the hall.

  “I’m telling you!” he called. “Clear out!”

  Nicholas Devine turned back toward the girl. He surveyed her sitting in her chair; she had dropped her chin to her hand to steady the whirling of her head.

  “We’ll go,” he said. “Come on.”

  “I just want to sit here,” she said. “Just let me sit here. I’m tired.”

  “Come on,” he repeated.

  “Why?” she muttered petulantly. “I’m tired.”

  “I want no interruptions. We’ll go elsewhere.”

  “Must dress!” she murmured dazedly, “can’t go on street without dress.”

  Nicholas Devine swept her frock from its place in the corner, gathered her wrap from the chair, and flung them over his arm. He grasped her wrist, tugging her to an unsteady standing position.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Dress!”

  He snatched the red checked table cloth from its place, precipitating bottles, ash-tray, and glasses into an indiscriminate pile, and threw the stained and odorous fabric across her shoulders. She gathered it about her like a toga; it hung at most points barely below her waist, but it satisfied the urge of her muddled mind for a covering of some sort.

  “We’ll go through the rear,” her companion said. “Into the alley. I want no trouble with that rat in the bar—yet!”

  He still held Pat’s wrist; she stumbled after him as he dragged her into the darkness of the hall. They moved through it blindly to a door at the far end; Nicholas swung it open upon a dim corridor flanked by buildings on either side, with a strip of star-sprinkled sky above.

  Pat’s legs were somehow incapable of their usual lithe grace; she failed to negotiate the single step, and crashed heavily to the concrete paving. The shock and the cooler air of the open steadied her momentarily; she felt no pain from her bruised knees, but a temporary rift in the fog that bound her mind. She gathered the red-checked cloth more closely about her shoulders as her companion, still clutching her wrist, jerked her violently to her feet.

  They moved into the gulch of the alley, and here she found difficulty in following. Her tiny high-heeled pumps slipped at every step on the uneven cobbles of the paving, and the unsteady footing made her lurch and stumble until the dusty stretch of the alley was a writhing panorama of shadows and lighted windows and stars. Nicholas Devine turned an impatient glare on her, and here in the semi-darkness, his face was again the face of the red-eyed demon. She dragged him to a halt, laughing strangely.

  “There it is!” she cried, pointing at him with her free hand. He turned again, staring at her with grim features.

  “What?”

  “There! Your face—the face of evil!” Again she laughed hysterically.

  The other stepped to her side; the disturbing eyes were inches from her own. He raised his hand as she laughed, slapped her sharply, so that her head reeled. He seized her shoulders, shaking her until the checkered cloth billowed like a flag in a wind.

  “Now come!” he muttered.

  But the girl, laughing no longer, leaned pale and weak against a low board fence. Her limbs seemed paralyzed, and movement was quite impossible. She was conscious of neither the blow nor the shaking, but only of a devastating nausea and an all-encompassing weakness. She bent over the fence; she was violently ill.

  Then the nausea had vanished, and a weariness, a strange lassitude, was all that remained. Nicholas Devine stood over her; suddenly he pressed her body to him in a convulsive embrace, so that her head dropped back, and his face loomed above her, obliterating the stars.

  “Ah!” he said. He seemed about to kiss her when a sound—voices—filtered out of somewhere in the maze of dark courts and littered yards along the alley. He released her, seized her wrist, and once more she was stumbling wretchedly behind him over the uneven surface of the cobblestones.

  A numbness had come over her; consciousness burned very low as she wavered doggedly along through the darkness. She perceived dimly that they were approaching the end of the alley; the brighter glow of the street loomed before them, and a passing motor car cut momentary parallel shafts of luminescence across the opening.

  Nicholas Devine slowed his pace, still clutching her wrist in a cold grip; he paused, moving cautiously toward the corner of the building. He peered around the edge of the structure, surveying the now deserted street, while Pat stood dully behind him, incapable alike of thought or voluntary movement, clutching desperately at the dirty cloth that hung about her shoulders.

  Her companion finished his survey; apparently satisfied that progress was safe, he dragged her after him, turning toward the corner beyond which his car was parked. The girl staggered behind him with diminishing vigor; consciousness was very nearly at the point of disappearance, and her steps were wavering unsteadily, and doggedly slow. She dragged heavily on his arm; he gave a gesture of impatience at her weakness.

  “Come on!” he growled. “We’re just going to the corner.” His voice rose slightly in pitch, still sounding harsh as rasping metals. “There still remains the ultimate evil!” he said. “There is still a depth of beauty unplumbed, a pain whose exquisite pleasure is yet to find!”

  They approached the corner; abruptly Nicholas Devine drew back as two figures came unexpectedly into view from beyond it. He turned back toward the alley-way, dragging the girl in a dizzy circle. He took a few rapid steps.

  But Pat was through, exhausted. At his first step she stumbled and sprawled, dragging prone behind him. He released her hand and turned defiantly to face the approaching men, while the girl lying on the pavement struggled to a sitting posture with her back against the wall. She turned dull, indifferent eyes on the scene, then was roused to a somewhat higher pitch of interest by the sound of a familiar voice.

  “There he is! I told you it was his car.”

  Dr. Horker! She struggled for clarity of thought; she realized dimly that she ought to feel relief, happiness—but all she could summon was a faint quickening of interest, or rather, a diminution of the lassitude that held her. She drew the rag of a table cloth about her and huddled against the wall, watching. The Doctor and some strange man, burly and massive in the darkness, dashed upon them, while Nicholas Devine waited, his red-orbed face a demoniac picture of cold contempt. Then the Doctor glanced at her huddled, bedraggled figure; she saw his face aghast, incredulous, as he perc
eived the condition of her clothing.

  “Pat! My God, girl! What’s happened? Where’ve you been?”

  She found a hidden reserve somewhere within her. Her voice rose, shrill and hysterical.

  “We’ve been in Hell!” she said. “You came to take me back, didn’t you? Orpheus and Eurydice!” She laughed. “Dr. Orpheus Horker!”

  The Doctor flashed her another incredulous glance and a grim and very terrible expression flamed in his face. He turned toward Nicholas Devine, his hands clenching, his mouth twisting without utterance, with no sound save a half-audible snarl. Then he spoke, a low, grating phrase flung at his thick-set companion.

  “Bring the car,” was all he said. The man lumbered away toward the corner, and he turned again toward Nicholas Devine, who faced him impassively. Suddenly his fist shot out; he struck the youth or demon squarely between the red eyes, sending him reeling back against the building. Then the Doctor turned, bending over Pat; she felt the pressure of his arms beneath knees and shoulders. He was carrying her toward a car that drew up at the curb; he was placing her gently in the back seat. Then, without a glance at the figure still leaning against the building, he swept from the sidewalk the dark mass that was Pat’s dress and her wrap, and re-entered the car beside her.

  “Shall I turn him in?” asked the man in the front seat.

  “We can’t afford the publicity,” said the Doctor, adding grimly, “I’ll settle with him later.”

  Pat’s head lurched as the car started; she was losing consciousness, and realized it vaguely, but she retained one impression as the vehicle swung into motion. She perceived that the face of the lone figure leaning against the building, a face staring at her with horror and unbelief, was no longer the visage of the demon of the evening, but that of her own Nick.

  CHAPTER 11

  Wreckage

  Pat opened her eyes reluctantly, with the impression that something unpleasant awaited her return to full consciousness. Something, as yet she could not recall just what, had happened to her; she was not even sure where she was awakening.

  However, her eyes surveyed her own familiar room; there opposite the bed grinned the jade Buddha on his stand on the mantel—the one that Nick had—Nick! A mass of troubled, terrible recollections thrust themselves suddenly into consciousness. She visioned a medley of disturbing pictures, as yet disconnected, unassorted, but waiting only the return of complete wakefulness. And she realized abruptly that her head ached miserably, that her mouth was parched, that twinges of pain were making themselves evident in various portions of her anatomy. She turned her head and caught a glimpse of a figure at the bed-side; her startled glance revealed Dr. Horker, sitting quietly watching her.

  “Hello, Doctor,” she said, wincing as her smile brought a sharp pain from her lips. “Or should I say, Good morning, Judge?”

  “Pat!” he rumbled, his growling tones oddly gentle. “Little Pat! How do you feel, child?”

  “Fair,” she said. “Just fair. Dr. Carl, what happened to me last night? I can’t seem to remember—Oh!”

  A flash of recollection pierced the obscure muddle. She remembered now—not all of the events of that ghastly evening, but enough. Too much!

  “Oh!” she murmured faintly. “Oh, Dr. Carl!”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “‘Oh!’—and would you mind very much telling me what that ‘Oh’ of yours implies?”

  “Why—”. She paused shuddering, as one by one the events of that sequence of horrors reassembled themselves. “Yes, I’d mind very much,” she continued. “It was nothing—” She turned to him abruptly. “Oh, it was, though, Dr. Carl! It was horrible, unspeakable, incomprehensible!—But I can’t talk about it! I can’t!”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” said the Doctor mildly. “Don’t you really want to discuss it?”

  “I do want to,” admitted the girl after a moment’s reflection. “I want to—but I can’t. I’m afraid to think of all of it.”

  “But what in Heaven’s name did you do?”

  “We just started out to go dancing,” she said hesitatingly. “Then, on the way to town, Nick—changed. He said someone was following us.”

  “Some one was,” said Horker. “I was, with Mueller. That Nick of yours has the Devil’s own cleverness!”

  “Yes,” the girl echoed soberly. “The Devil’s own!—Who’s Mueller, Dr. Carl?”

  “He’s a plain-clothes man, friend of mine. I treated him once. What do you mean by changed?”

  “His eyes,” she said. “And his mouth. His eyes got reddish and terrible, and his mouth got straight and grim. And his voice turned sort of—harsh.”

  “Ever happen before, that you know of?”

  “Once. When—” She paused.

  “Yes. Last Wednesday night, when you came over to ask those questions about pure science. What happened then?”

  “We went to a place to dance.”

  “And that’s the reason, I suppose,” rumbled the Doctor sardonically, “that I found you wandering about the streets in a table cloth, step-ins, and a pair of hose! That’s why I found you on the verge of passing out from rotten liquor, and looking like the loser of a battle with an airplane propellor! What happened to your face?”

  “My face? What’s wrong with it?”

  The Doctor rose from his chair and seized the hand-mirror from her dressing table.

  “Look at it!” he commanded, passing her the glass.

  Pat gazed incredulously at the reflection the surface presented; a dark bruise colored her cheek, her lips were swollen and discolored, and her chin bore a jagged scratch. She stared at the injuries in horror.

  “Your knees are skinned, too,” said Horker. “Both of them.”

  Pat slipped one pajamaed limb from the covers, drawing the pants-leg up for inspection. She gasped in startled fright at the great red stain on her knee.

  “That’s mercurochrome,” said the Doctor. “I put it there.”

  “You put it there. How did I get home last night, Dr. Carl? How did I get to bed?”

  “I’m responsible for that, too. I put you to bed.” He leaned forward. “Listen, child—your mother knows nothing about this as yet. She wasn’t home when I brought you in, and she’s not awake yet this morning. We’ll tell her you had an automobile accident; explain away those bruises.—And now, how did you get them?”

  “I fell, I guess. Two or three times.”

  “That bruise on your cheek isn’t from falling.”

  The girl shuddered. Now in the calm light of morning, the events of last night seemed doubly horrible; she doubted her ability to believe them, so incredible did they seem. She was at a loss to explain even her own actions, and those of Nicholas Devine were simply beyond comprehension, a chapter from some dark and blasphemous book of ancient times—the Kabbala or the Necronomicon.

  “What happened, Pat?” queried the Doctor gently. “Tell me,” he urged her.

  “I—can’t explain it,” she said doubtfully. “He took me to that place, but drinking the liquor was my own fault. I did it out of spite because I saw he didn’t—care for me. And then—” She fell silent.

  “Yes? And then?”

  “Well—he began to talk about the beauty of evil, the delights of evil, and his eyes glared at me, and—I don’t understand it at all, Dr. Carl, but all of a sudden I was—yielding. Do you see?”

  “I see,” he said gently, soberly.

  “Suddenly I seemed to comprehend what he meant—all that about the supreme pleasure of evil. And I was sort of—swept away. The dress—was his fault, but I—somehow I’d lost the power to resist. I guess I was drunk.”

  “And the bruises? And your cut lips?” queried the Doctor grimly.

  “Yes,” she said in a low voice. “He—struck me. After a while I didn’t care. He could have—would have done other things, only we were interrup
ted, and had to leave. And that’s all, Dr. Carl.”

  “Isn’t that enough?” he groaned. “Pat, I should have killed the fiend there!”

  “I’m glad you didn’t.”

  “Do you mean to say you’d care?”

  “I—don’t know.”

  “Are you intimating that you still love him?”

  “No,” she said thoughtfully. “No, I don’t love him, but—Dr. Carl, there’s something inexplicable about this. There’s something I don’t understand, but I’m certain of one thing!”

  “What’s that?”

  “That it wasn’t Nick—not my Nick—who did those things to me last night. It wasn’t, Dr. Carl!”

  “Pat, you’re being a fool!”

  “I know it. But I’m sure of it, Dr. Carl. I know Nick; I loved him, and I know he couldn’t have done—that. Not the same gentle Nick that I had to beg to kiss me!”

  “Pat,” said the Doctor gently, “I’m a psychiatrist; it’s my business to know all the rottenness that can hide in a human being. My office is the scene of a parade of misfits, failures, potential criminals, lunatics, and mental incompetents. It’s a nasty, bitter side I see of life, but I know that side—and I tell you this fellow is dangerous!”

  “Do you understand this, Dr. Carl?”

  He reached over, taking her hand in his great palm with its long, curious delicate fingers. “I have my theory, Pat. The man’s a sadist, a lover of cruelty, and there’s enough masochism in any woman to make him terribly dangerous. I want your promise.”

  “About what?”

  “I want you to promise never to see him again.”

  The girl turned serious eyes on his face; he noted with a shock of sympathy that they were filled with tears.

  “You warned me I’d get burned playing with fire,” she said. “You did, didn’t you?”

  “I’m an old fool, Honey. If I’d believed my own advice, I’d have seen that this never happened to you.” He patted her hand. “Have I your promise?”

  She averted her eyes. “Yes,” she murmured. He winced as he perceived that the tears were on her cheeks.