The Dark on the Other Side

I

WHEN MICHAEL DISCOVERED THE TRICK SHE HAD played on him, his first reaction was anger-not at his own stupidity, but at Linda. Gordon, who had just come back after an inspection of the alley under the fire escape, smile wryly at his expression.

“I know just how you feel, but don’t let it get you.”

“You told me she was intelligent,” Michael said, recovering. “I should have believed you.”

Gordon’s smile faded.

“The operative word is not intelligence. There’s a special kind of cunning developed by people in her condition… Oh, hell, Mike, I’m still trying to mince words. I’m sorrier than I can say that you got dragged into this mess; but now that you are involved, it would be stupid of me to hold anything back.”

Michael couldn’t help remembering that it was Gordon who had dragged him into the mess. Then his annoyed vanity faded at the sight of Gordon’s tormented face, and he shrugged.

“I feel very bad about letting her get away. If I had realized how sick she was-”

“Precisely why you shouldn’t feel guilty. It was my fault for understating the problem. Let’s forget that and go on to something constructive.”

“Shouldn’t we be trying to trace her? There’s a subway station in the next block; cabs aren’t too frequent around here…”

“Briggs is already on that,” Gordon said.

“Oh. Sure.”

Another unwelcome memory recurred to Michael-the look of unconcealed repugnance on Linda’s face whenever she saw Briggs. Surely he wasn’t the best person to send after a frightened woman… He shrugged the doubt away. It was none of his business.

“How about a drink?”

“No, thanks; I’d better get moving.”

But Gordon appeared to be in no hurry; drawing on his gloves with deliberate care, he managed to look poised and aristocratic in spite of his obvious worry. By just standing there he made the shabby little room look shabbier. His keen black eyes moved around, lingering on the paper-strewn desk.

“How do you feel about the biography now?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve put quite a bit of work into it…”

“Have you really?” Gordon’s dark gaze swung back to Michael. “Whom have you talked to? Or should I ask that?”

“Oh, sure, why not? I started with the colleges. You made quite an impression at both of them.”

“They all mouth the conventional academic baloney,” Gordon said cynically. “Wait till you talk to my former political cohorts. They won’t be so complimentary.”

“They were somewhat annoyed at your retirement, I suppose.”

“A euphemism.” Gordon smiled. “But by all means talk with them; you’ll get an interesting view of my personality. Well. I’ll be in touch, Mike.”

“Please do. I’m concerned too.”

When Gordon finally went, Michael dropped into the big overstuffed chair and put all ten fingers in his hair.

She had looked so young.

The glamorous hostess in her expensive gowns had seemed mature; the shrewish wife had a woman’s cruelty. But she wasn’t that many years out of college; she must be ten, even fifteen, years younger than Gordon. And when she sat huddled in his big chair, with the rain dripping down onto her pale cheeks, she had looked about sixteen. Her hands and feet were as fragile as a child’s; the sodden shoes had been no longer than his hands.

Yes, he reminded himself, and she had presence of mind enough to take those pathetic little slippers with her when she outfoxed him. Poor little Cinderella? Rich little Lucrezia Borgia was more like it. But still he sat motionless, head in his hands, his fingers contracting as if their pressure could force from his mind the picture that persisted through every conscious doubt-the picture of a slight, dark figure running down a dusky corridor, growing smaller and more tenuous as it fled, until it finally vanished into air.

II

Next morning Michael went around and heckled his agent. Sam Cohen was not noted for his equable disposition; after half an hour of querulous dithering, he exploded.

“What the hell do you mean, you don’t know whether you want to write it or not? You’ve got to write it. We’ve got a contract!”

“I didn’t sign it in my own blood,” Michael snarled.

Sam recognized the signs; he was used to them, but he got writer’s temperament so seldom from Michael that it took him by surprise. After a blink of his scanty eyelashes, he went into the routine.

“Mike, you know this is the best deal I’ve ever gotten for you. It’s too good to pass up, even if you don’t care about the damage you could do your professional reputation if you renege on a formal contract. Hell, we may have a best seller on our hands if this rumor about Randolph ’s going back into politics is true.”

Michael sat up in his chair.

“Where did you hear that?”

“The essential criterion of a rumor is that nobody knows how it started. But I’ve heard it mentioned more than once.”

“Hmph. I didn’t know you could do that. Get back into the game, I mean.”

“Why not? He never lost an election, you know. With his money and charm, the party bosses would jump at him. Sure, it will take a little time to get his name before the public again, but-didn’t you ever wonder why he agreed to this biography when he’s refused even an interview for years?”

“I guess I am naïve,” Michael said slowly. “He’s a nice guy, you know. The idea of his using me-”

“Naïve is right,” Sam snorted. “So how is he using you? Making you rich is all. Does that make him any less of a nice guy? Oh, get out of here, and let me work. And do some work yourself.”

Michael grinned and wandered out. On the street he stood blinking at the feeble sunshine and wondering what he wanted to do. He had called Gordon that morning, when the latter had failed to call him. Linda was still missing. The sunshine was anemic. The smog was heavier than usual. It was a lousy day. He was in a lousy mood.

So he spent the day doing nothing. He made a feeble attempt to clean up the apartment, a chore which was weeks overdue, but he knew his real motive was to be at home in case Gordon called. He did manage to get the dirty laundry collected; there were socks under the cushion of the chair and a sock on the kitchen table. Rooting around in the bottom of the wardrobe, he found a pile of dirty shirts. On top of them lay a small, crumpled black glove.

Straightening up, with the glove in his hand, Michael abandoned the shirts. So that was where she had been; obviously, there wasn’t any other place. Then he remembered something, and, turning, he bellowed loudly for the cat. Napoleon was gone. Deprived of an audience, Michael muttered to himself. The animal was obviously getting senile. Or else there was something about Linda Randolph that appealed to him. A nasty thought, that one…

By evening, when the phone still refused to ring, Michael was desperate. He straightened his desk. He managed to cram half the books that had been on it into one bookshelf or another, but there was no place for the rest. He needed another bookcase. Only, where was he going to put it? Every inch of wall space in living room and bedroom was already taken up. Maybe the bath-room…Then, on the bottom of a pile, he found the book that he had bought and then ignored. Randolph ’s masterpiece. With a snort, Michael threw himself into a chair and began to read.

He came to three hours later when Napoleon bit him on the ankle, milder attempts to gain attention having failed. Still carrying the book, he stumbled out into the kitchen. He gave Napoleon the hamburger he had intended for his own dinner, an error he didn’t even notice till the next day. He went on reading.

At four in the morning he finished the book, and fell groggily into bed in a state of mingled exaltation and rage. The pathetic little mental image of Gordon’s wife had developed a set of fangs. Anyone who could write a book like that when he was still in his twenties…The man needed encouragement, admiration, an atmosphere of peace and quiet-not a crazy wife who probably resented his superior talent. Lying awake in the darkness, Michael could see the ghosts of Gordon’s unwritten books, laid out in a row like murdered babies. Murdered in utero by Gordon’s wife.

This partisan mood carried Michael through the next few days. He didn’t call Gordon, but Gordon called him and reported that Linda had not yet been found. He sounded less edgy. Of course, if she had been hurt or killed, she would have been heard of by this time, Michael thought. Personally, he no longer gave a damn.

He spent two infuriating days trying to track down some of Gordon’s political associates, knowing full well that he would never reach the hidden men who made the real decisions, and discovering that politicians were even more peripatetic than academicians and just as impressed with their own importance. Yet through the platitudes and glittering generalities, an impression gradually formed. He believed the rumors of Gordon’s return to politics. It was ridiculous, of course, to resent Gordon’s failure to take him into his confidence. Maybe he hadn’t made up his mind yet.

Michael found himself curious to read some of Gordon’s political speeches. They were not easy to locate; the big-city newspapers had not followed out-of-state local campaigns in detail. Finally he managed to find back issues of the leading newspaper of Gordon’s state.

Even in cold print the speeches were impressive. Michael could imagine their effectiveness when they were delivered with the full force of Gordon’s dynamic personality. He had wondered what kind of political speech might be composed by the man who wrote that fantastic book. Now he knew. Of course the media were completely different; a political speech was not a novel. But the similarity was there, not in phrasing or in content so much as in an underlying integrity, the product of a particular kind of mind.

Gordon’s candidacy had been supported by the newspaper. It got a lot of coverage, and the not so-subtle slant in the reporting, compared with the tone taken toward Gordon’s unfortunate opponent, made Michael’s mouth twist in wry amusement. Politics, he thought, with the comfortable contempt of a man who has never run for office. Well, you couldn’t blame Gordon for the traditional dirtiness of the game… He kicked himself mentally. Blame, hell, you don’t condemn or approve, he reminded himself. You just read. And write, if possible.

It was pure accident that he saw the item at all. It was on the front page, but it was hidden down in the lowest left-hand corner, and Gordon’s name was mentioned only once, in small print. There was a photograph, and he studied the inexpressive features of the young man with interest. Copied from a formal studio portrait, the face was not distinctive. High forehead, hair and eyes of some indeterminate dark color, horn-rimmed glasses so big that they reduced the features to unimportance. Gordon’s campaign manager, William S. Wilson.

The name was familiar. Michael groped through his mental card file on Randolph for several seconds before he realized that the familiarity had nothing to do with contemporary events. The name was that of Edgar Allan Poe’s character. A nice, cheerful story that one, about a man haunted by his own ghost.

The analogy was nonexistent. Accidental death, the police believed-the strain of an exciting campaign, and too many sleeping pills. There was no reason why the young, successful assistant of a rising politician should take his own life.

Michael was curious enough to pursue the story. The next installment had retreated from page one to page fourteen, reasonably enough, since there were no dramatic developments. The assumption of accidental death was confirmed by all the evidence the police had been able to turn up. So much for William Wilson.

Michael didn’t know, then, that the seed had been planted. It had not yet taken root; it just sat there in the darkness of his subconscious mind, rubbing a little, but beginning to be encased, like a grain of sand in an oyster, by layers of protective preconceptions. But the intrusion was a seed, not a sterile piece of grit. The telephone call he got the next day started it growing.

Typically, Galen didn’t waste any words.

“Have you resolved your latest problem?” he asked, as soon as he had identified himself to his surprised listener.

“No, she’s still missing. Where are you?”

“ Paris, of course. I told you I’d be here till the end of this week. Michael, I want you to go over to my office and-”

“You’re calling me from Paris? Why?”

“If you’ll be quiet for a minute, I’ll tell you. I’m due at a symposium in about four and a half minutes. Go over to my office and pick up an envelope my secretary has for you. I’ve already spoken to her.”

“You want me to mail it to you?” Michael asked, groping.

“If I wanted something mailed to me, I’d have my secretary mail it,” Gordon said impatiently. “The envelope is for you. Go and get it now. Don’t make any decisions until you’ve read the contents.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I don’t believe I’ve used any words of over three syllables, have I? I must go now. I’ll be in touch with you as soon as I get back. And remember, don’t do anything drastic until you’ve seen that envelope.”

The receiver went down with a decisive click. Galen never bothered with hellos and good-byes.

Michael hung up. There was no use trying to call back. He didn’t know what hotel Galen was staying at, and it was more than likely that Galen would refuse to add anything to his enigmatic message even if he could be located. He was never obscure except by choice.

Michael got up and wandered over to the window. It was raining again. The sky, what little he could see of it, was a dirty gray, and the puddles in the alley reflected the sallow light with a sheen of oily iridescence. Even on the fourth floor, with the window closed, he could hear the snarl of bumper-to-bumper traffic on the street. Absently, Michael drew his initials in the smeary film on the inside of the pane. The hell with it. He wasn’t going all the way across town on a day like this just to pick up an envelope.

The foul evening darkened, the rain beat a peremptory tattoo against the window. Michael wandered the apartment like a caged lion, unable to settle down or even to understand the strange sense of uneasiness that grew, slowly but steadily. Unable to concentrate and unwilling to go out, he puttered with small jobs he had been putting off; he put a new light bulb in the kitchen and started to cook himself something to eat. It was then that he discovered he had given Napoleon the hamburger. There was nothing else fit to eat except various things in cans, and he realized he wasn’t hungry anyhow. He was too nervous to eat.

Nervous. Slowly Michael let himself down into a chair and considered the word. He reviewed the symptoms: taut muscles, mildly queasy stomach, restlessness, general malaise of mind. Yes, that was his trouble; he was as nervous as a cat… He gave the somnolent Napoleon a look of hate, and revised the figure of speech. He hadn’t had the symptoms for years, that was why he had been so slow to recognize them-not since college exams, or the early days of his working career, when a particular interview, or letter, or telephone call might make or break his new-hatched confidence in himself. So why now, when there was nothing hanging over him that really mattered?

The thing hit him with the violence of an earthquake, but it was nothing physical, nothing that any of the conventional senses would have recognized. Yet it was as peremptory as the sudden shrilling of a telephone in a silent room. It summoned, like a shout; it tugged at the mind like a grasping hand. It lasted for only a second or two, in measurable time; but while it lasted, the room faded out and gray fog closed in around him. He was conscious of nothing except the calling. Even the hard seat of the chair under him and the solidity of the floor beneath his feet seemed to dissolve. It stopped as abruptly as it had begun. There was no fading out, merely a cessation.

Michael found himself on his feet. His face was wet with perspiration, and his knees were weak. Blinking like a man who has emerged from a cave into bright sunshine, he looked around the familiar kitchen, and found its very normalcy an affront. The table was still a table; it rocked slightly under the pressure of his hand as it always did. It ought to have changed into an elephant or a tortoise. The view from the kitchen window should not be the normal view of night darkness; it ought to show an alien sun over some weird landscape. The thing that had invaded his mind was as shattering and as inexplicable as any such transformation.

But the most incredible thing about the experience was that he accepted it. He knew, not only what the calling was, but who had sent it. Knew? The verb was too weak; there was no word in the language for the absolute, suprarational conviction that filled his mind.

He was still a little unsteady on his feet as he crossed the room. He noticed that Napoleon was no longer in his favorite place by the door. Evidently the cat had left, and he hadn’t even heard him go.

His desk was covered with papers, notes, books. Michael didn’t touch any of them. Slumped in his chair, his eyes fixed on vacancy, he thought. It was one of the hardest jobs he had ever done in his life; methodically, he examined and demolished all the guideposts he had established in the past ten days-as well as a few mental monuments that had been standing a lot longer. It left his conscious mind pretty bare. He didn’t try to construct any new theories to fill it up. He couldn’t yet.

The urgent impulse that still gripped him, even though its stimulus had vanished, did not interfere with his thinking; it occupied a level much more basic than reason or conscious thought. It was rather like an overpowering hunger or thirst. But he couldn’t yield to it yet; a man who walks along a contaminated stream knows, even though his throat is a dusty agony, that he cannot relieve the pain until he finds clear water.

Why hadn’t he gone out, that afternoon, to get the envelope Galen wanted him to have? The office was closed now, and he didn’t know the secretary’s last name, or address.

The contents of that envelope must concern Randolph, and they must be important. That conclusion wasn’t intuitive; it was the result of logic. Galen’s reaction that night, when he learned the identity of the fugitive, had been markedly peculiar. He hadn’t been merely surprised; he had been worried. That last, hasty spate of advice had also been uncharacteristic: Don’t do anything, don’t take any action whatsoever. I’ll discuss it with you when I get back.

But Galen had decided the matter couldn’t wait. That oblique reference at the beginning of the telephone conversation indicated that he had been thinking about the Randolphs, and strongly suggested that the rest of the conversation concerned them. Galen thought nothing of trans-Atlantic telephone calls, or any other obstacle that stood in the way of what he wanted done, but he did not extend himself over a mere whim. The material must be important. And if it were favorable, noncontroversial, Galen wouldn’t be so cautious about it.

Unless one of the Randolphs had been Galen’s patient. Michael dismissed that theory at once. Under no circumstances would Galen discuss a patient’s case with him. No, the connection had to be something else; and Michael had a pretty good idea as to what it must be.

He tried to remember his first impressions of Galen, but he couldn’t pin them down; Galen had just been one of the Old Man’s friends, too antique to be interesting. Galen must be over sixty-he had to be, if he and the Old Man had been at school together in Europe, before the last big war. He didn’t look it. Physical fitness was something of a fetish with him. Not surprising, perhaps, after the two-year hell of a concentration camp and the desperate years of underground fighting that had preceded the camp. More surprising was Galen’s mental stability. There was a certain ruthlessness under that passionless exterior of his, but he was as free of bitterness as he was free of optimism. It was revealing, perhaps, that he never spoke of the war years, or of the wife and small son who had been devoured by the holocaust. His reference to his boyhood pet was one of the few times Michael had ever heard him mention his childhood. His parents, too…

It was Michael’s father who had been primarily responsible for getting Galen out of the chaos of postwar Germany; the kind of help the old man had given during those years had never been made explicit to Michael, by either man; but after his father’s death, Galen was-there. Silent, withdrawn, unsentimental-but there.

Michael shook himself mentally. This was a sidetrack, a waste of time. There was no point in speculating when, in a few hours, he would have the answer in his hands. In the meantime…

He thought for another hour. At the end of that time he finally moved, but not much; when he finished, there was on the table a single sheet of paper. It contained only four names, in Michael’s cramped writing, but he contemplated the meager results of his labors with grim satisfaction.

Then he picked up the pen and added a phrase after three of the names.

William Wilson. Dead. Suicide?

Tommy Scarinski. Nervous breakdown; attempted suicide.

Joseph Schwartz. Breakdown; drugs.

He paused, pen poised, studying the list. Incredulity was hard to conquer. It seemed so unlikely… Yet there they were, four of the people who had been closest to Gordon Randolph in his adult life. His campaign manager and friend, and his three prize students during that single year as a teacher-a position, surely, that gives a man or woman enormous influence over younger minds. And of those three, one was still a nervous wreck, and another had retreated from a promising career into a world of drug-induced terrors. And the third…

The third was Randolph ’s wife.

III

Threading a tempestuous path through a mammoth traffic jam, Michael blasphemed the beautiful weather and the long weekend. The balmy sunshine had infected half the inhabitants of the city with the urge to flee to Nature. Galen’s secretary was one of them. It was after ten that morning when the answering service told him the office wouldn’t be open, and he had wasted more time in a futile attempt to track down Galen’s secretary. Finally he drove to Galen’s house and harassed his manservant until the poor devil consented to open up the office and help him search. That had taken several more hours-the harassment, not the search. Whatever her other failings, Galen’s secretary did what she was told. The envelope, with Michael’s name typed neatly on it, was in the top drawer of her desk.

Badly as he wanted to examine the contents, another need was stronger. He had wakened that morning with a renewed uneasiness, not so demolishing as the call that had summoned him the night before, but constant and peremptory. He was on his way now to answer it.

He braked, swearing, as a blue Volkswagen roared blithely past on the left and ducked into the nice legal margin between Michael’s car and the rear of the one ahead of him. He couldn’t even think in this chaos; driving took too much concentration, with so many morons on the road.

He resisted the childish desire to drive right up onto the back fender of the Volkswagen. Today, of all days, he couldn’t take any chances. The afternoon was far gone; but he would reach his destination in two or three hours, and by that time he had to have a clearer idea of what he meant to do when he got there. So far the demand had been strong and basic, blotting out all thoughts but one: Get there. Sooner or later, though, he would have to make a plan. He couldn’t stand on Andrea’s doorstep waiting for another message from Beyond.

Linda must be at Andrea’s. It was the only place she knew, the only potential ally who had not failed her. Michael had reached that conclusion logically; direction was one of the elements the mental call had lacked. Gordon had already searched the witch’s cottage, which did not lessen the probability of Linda’s being there now; the safest hiding place is one that has already been investigated. But she would be wary of visitors in general and hostile toward Michael in particular. Remembering the telephone book, open to the page with Galen’s name, Michael felt the same mixture of shame and chagrin that had moved him originally. He wasn’t proud of his performance that night. To say the least, it had been stupid. She probably thought of it as betrayal. No, she wouldn’t let him into the house, not unless the days of loneliness and fear had reduced her courage to the breaking point. He might have to break into the house-a prospect he faced with surprising equanimity. For such a purpose, darkness would be useful.

But when he stopped at a restaurant in the next town, it was not only because of the need to kill a little more time. He couldn’t wait any longer to see what was in Galen’s envelope.

It was a big Manila envelope and it was sealed not only by tape but by a heavy wad of sealing wax. The wax was fresh and the envelope clean, which meant that the material it contained must have been gathered together only recently. It was not one of those envelopes so dear to writers of sensational fiction, which has been moldering for years in a secret hiding place until the deus ex machina of the book produces it just in time to foil the villain. The envelope was not bulky. It could not contain more than a dozen sheets of paper.

When he had the papers in his hand, Michael sat staring blindly at them for a while before he started to read. He had been expecting what he found; it was, after all, the most logical connecting link between Galen and Randolph. But it was still something of a shock to see again the sprawling, angular handwriting that had once been as familiar as his own.

A letter a week for almost seven years, arriving every Tuesday morning. Careless and unmethodical as his father was about other things, he wrote every Sunday. Michael never kept personal letters after he answered them; there certainly had been no particular point in saving his father’s. They were good letters, informative and amusing because of their acidulous comments on people, books, and events. So far as he could remember, the old man had never mentioned Randolph. Which was not surprising; by the time he had left home, Randolph was no longer a student.

His father had written less frequently to Galen, but he had kept up a regular correspondence with his old friend. Galen never threw anything away. These letters were only a small part of the mass of materials that were docketed, labeled, and filed-both in the neat cabinets filling several rooms of Galen’s house, and in the latter’s capacious memory. Galen had not kept these letters because of a premonition. But he would not have produced them now unless they had significance.

After these optimistic deductions, the first letter was a disappointment. It didn’t even mention Randolph ’s name.

Professor Collins rambled on for two pages about the petty gossip and activities of the university. Michael knew that some of the ivory towers were rat infested, but he had forgotten how largely small malices can loom, even to a mind that is supposed to wander in the airy realms of ideas. Cheating on examinations, unexpected pregnancies, a rumor of students dabbling in black magic…Nothing was new on the campuses. There was only one name mentioned in the letter, that of a student for whom his father had high hopes. His name was not Randolph.

Puzzled and deflated, Michael put the letter aside. Maybe Galen’s secretary had made a mistake, or else Galen had told her to include all the letters dated to a particular year. He could hardly quote specific identifying details over the telephone, especially when he hadn’t read the letters for over ten years.

Michael felt sure of this hypothesis when he started the next letter and found Randolph ’s name in the opening paragraph. The context was not precisely what he had come to expect of Gordon Randolph.

“These sporadic flashes of brilliance baffle me,” his father had written of the school’s star athlete and president of the student body. “I expected great things of the boy, he’s already a school legend, but he never happened to take any of my courses until this year-which is his last. I’d say that literature simply wasn’t his field, if it weren’t for that rare outstanding essay.”

The rest was inconsequential, for Michael’s purposes. There was another reference to the devil worshipers, whose existence was now a well-established rumor. His father found them exasperating, whoever they were: “They’ve been reading about the Hellfire Club and decided to imitate that bunch of nasty-minded little-”

The next word was indecipherable; which, Michael thought, with a reminiscent grin, was probably just as well. His father’s collection of epithets and expletives were drawn from the riper Restoration dramatists; some of them had curled his hair even in his supercilious high school days.

As he read on, his sentimental nostalgia increased; but so did his bewilderment. There were eight letters in all. One of them didn’t even mention Randolph, the others contained more references to his father’s pet student-what was the kid’s name?-Al Something-than to Gordon. Poor old Dad must have been losing his grip, Michael thought. Gordon was only a few years away from his great book; according to the publisher’s blurb, parts of it had actually been written while he was in college. If his father hadn’t spotted a talent of that magnitude…

The last letter was no more informative, but it was something of a shocker. His father’s handwriting was shakier than usual, and his sentences were so garbled by emotion as to be relatively incoherent in parts. The feeble idiocy of the campus Hellfire Club had exploded into scandal and disaster; one student was dead as a result of an occult experiment, which his father’s Victorian inhibitions had kept him from describing in detail. And that student was the boy for whom he had had such hopes-Alfred Green.

Large as the affair had been in the minuscule world of the university, it hadn’t made much of a splash in the press. Michael remembered hearing something about it, but the influential board of trustees had succeeded in suppressing the details. Still, reading between the lines, it must have been a nasty business. The word was his father’s. It kept recurring, through the scribbled agitation of the lines: nasty, foul, disgusting. It would seem that way to him, Michael thought. Then, at the end of the letter, came a hasty postscript.

“Young Randolph came by this evening, to express his regrets. Alfred was one of his closest friends. It was kind of the boy, and perceptive, to know that this has hurt me worse than an ordinary scandal would have done. Perhaps I haven’t been fair to him. Antipathy is an odd thing.”

Michael sat staring at the last page for a long time, while the cigarette burned down between his lax fingers and his second cup of coffee grew cold. He felt completely deflated. He had expected a complete, startling answer to the enigma that had begun as a simple problem of character, and which had now taken on such ominous outlines. But there was no answer in these letters, only new questions. In the back of his mind the mental call still pulled, confusing what wits he had left.

It was not until he was trudging through a blue twilight on his way to the place where he had left the car that he realized what the letters had told him. Another death. Randolph ’s triumphant career seemed to be unnecessarily littered with corpses.

He forgot this new piece of the puzzle, which was merely an addition to his list rather than a clue as to why the list existed, as he drove through the streets of the village near Randolph ’s estate. The street lights had come on and the houses looked peaceful and homey, with lights twinkling through the gathering darkness. The temperature had dropped, though; the wind that tossed the boughs was sharp. He rolled up the car window.

He hit a snag when he turned into the curving streets of the suburb. He had already observed that the inhabitants of Brentwood liked their privacy. There were no quaint mailboxes with names on them along the curving drives and walled estates. There weren’t many street lights, either. Maybe the rich didn’t need them. They had their own methods of guarding against crime-burglar alarms, dogs, even private guards.

Nor did Andrea court publicity. Michael found the house at last only because it was at the end of the sole road that was unpaved and unland-scaped. A survival from a simpler past, he thought, jouncing down the rutty lane. If there was a house down here, it was well hidden. Mud squelched under the tires, and he had visions of being thoroughly stuck, at the end of a road that petered out into forest.

As the thought formed, the road ended. The dark shapes of trees loomed up, and Michael jammed on the brakes, skidding. He saw the gate, and knew that he had arrived.

It was the sort of gate Andrea might have had constructed to her specifications if she had set up shop as a newly certified witch-wooden, rickety, sagging on rusted hinges. Thick, untrimmed shrubs concealed the path beyond and leaned out over the fence like watchful sentries. The house beyond was visible only as a crazy shape of roofs and chimneys that cut off a section of starry sky. There was no light, and no sign of human life.

Shapes other than man-made cut off the starlight. Half the sky was curtained by clouds. The wind lifted Michael’s hair from his forehead and turned the boughs of the tall shrubs into armed appendages, which thrust out in abrupt challenge. The clouds hung heaviest toward the east. As Michael watched, distracted from his search by the eerie movement of the night, a glow of light flickered above the tops of the pines, like the ghost of a sick sunset. It was followed by a slow, far-off roll of thunder.

Practical considerations intruded on the fascination of the approaching storm. This trek might turn out to be more disastrous than a plain old wild-goose chase. The road was already gluey with mud; another heavy rain could maroon him in this abandoned lane. He had better check the house and get out.

The mental call that had brought him a hundred miles was gone.

When it had left-if it had ever existed, save in his imagination-he could not remember. But its absence left him feeling blind or deaf, bereft of a sense that had, even in so short a time, become something he depended on as uncritically as he accepted the use of his eyes. For the first time in nearly twenty-four hours he examined his activities in the cold light of reason, and found them folly. Only his inborn stubbornness brought his hand to the latch of the gate.

It screeched rustily. He had half expected that it would, but the sound, shattering the quiet night, made him jump. As he took a tentative step forward, something streaked across the path in front of him. He grabbed instinctively at the branch of the shrub, stabbed his thumb on something sharp, and let out a yell. The shrub had thorns.

The darting streak that crossed his path hadn’t triggered any fantasies, though; he knew what it was-a cat, one of the dozen that Andrea was reputed to keep. He wondered where the others were, and what arrangements Andrea made for their comfort while she was off on her frequent trips. Then he realized that all the shrubbery was alive with movement. The action of the wind made the foliage mutter; but there were other sounds. Small, ground-level movements rustled branches and made leaves whisper. He saw something glow into life at the base of a bush near the house-two small round dots of red fire. The cats prowled.

He went down the path, feeling with feet and extended hands. The clouds had grown heavier; there was no moon, and even the faint starlight became increasingly obscured. He found the house by running into it, literally. By daylight it was probably attractive; there was a low porch, flanked by pillars and draped with vines. He had banged his head on one of the pillars. The roof hung low, almost brushing his head. He made his way to the door and fumbled for a bell or a knocker.

This was the moment of low ebb. The expedition seemed utterly futile, his mood of the last few hours a wild delusion. The door did not seem to have a bell, and even if he found some means of making his presence known, he did not expect an answer. Then lightning split the sky-nearer now, a thin sword of light instead of a far-off glow. For a split second he saw the details of the door starkly outlined-brass knocker shaped like a frog’s head, small leaded window, even the splinters in the wooden panels where impatient cats had demanded entry. Then the light vanished, leaving his eyes blinded. But his muscles remembered, and his hand found the knocker.

The damn thing made a sound like a bass drum. Echoes rolled into the windy night; he heard them mutter and die inside, beyond the door. Then the panels moved.

The inside of the house was darker than the night. He saw only the pale oval of her face, suspended in blackness. He never doubted her identity, even though she seemed smaller than he remembered, as small as a child, as small as a bent old woman.

“I knew it was you,” she said, in a breathy whisper.

Michael nodded, then realized that she could see no more of him than he could see of her.

“I figured you’d be here.”

“Why didn’t you come before?”

“It wasn’t until last night that I got your-” Michael stopped; it was hard enough to mention his fantastic experience, but the phrase he had been about to use reduced it to inanity, as if the thing he had received had been a telegram or phone call.

Then he realized she was not listening. She was looking past him, out into the dark garden.

He was slower to perceive. He realized first that the wind had died; leaf and bough hung motionless, as if in apprehension of what was coming. He thought, This is going to be one hell of a storm. And he knew the thought for what it was-the desperate defense of the commonplace against a phenomenon it was afraid to admit. For the stillness was abnormal. Linda’s hand gripped his arm, her fingers digging in like claws. At the same instant the silence burst. He recognized the sounds, but they sounded different, here, than they had coming from the back alleys of the city. Cats. The howls and snarls seemed to come from more than a dozen feline throats. The shrubbery was animate with glowing eyes and flying bodies.

The fury of the cats might have warned him, if he had had time to think. The next flash of lightning came too quickly; it caught him unprepared. The storm was moving in. All the horizon was dark with boiling masses of cloud, and the thunderclap came close on the heels of the light, booming like a cannon’s roar. In the ghastly gray-blue light he saw it. Standing stiff-legged and huge, it might have been only a monstrous image, cut out of basalt or obsidian. But the pricked, listening ears were alive, and so were the eyes, glowing with an inner fire. When the darkness returned, he felt as if every light in the world had failed, and the darkness was worse than the vision itself, because he knew it was still out there, waiting-the black dog.