An Old Friend of the Family

EIGHTEEN

Before the immobilizing drug wore off, Carol bound Joe’s arms and legs with strong cord and tape. She worked so cunningly that the bonds were almost comfortable, and yet when he was able to try to move again he soon discovered that he could barely twitch a muscle.

A preoccupied expert, Carol smiled at him absently as she worked. “Joe, my little dear, are you awake? Yes. Too bad, in a way. You might just have slept from here on. Don’t worry, though. You’re going to rather enjoy things at the end, I promise you that. It really does work that way. Now, all nicely packaged.” She gave him a pat, then picked him up, dandling a baby effortlessly. “You must be packaged safely, because Mommy is going out for a while. I have to go and play with little Craig once more—to try to salvage him. Because at the moment he’s the only breather I have left who’ll work with me. And you breathers are so useful for some things. Yes, you are.”

Carol carried Joe into an unfinished side-room, about eight feet by ten, hardly more than a large storage closet. Barrels and crates and boxes almost filled the place. A second door, the upper half of it glass-paneled, led to another, much larger, darkened room or area, where streetlight entering by distant windows showed bare concrete walls and floor, sawhorses, scraps of lumber, a can of paint or two.

He got only one glance out through the glass panel, for Carol promptly lowered him to the floor, left him sitting there leaning against something solid at his back.

Before she straightened up, she kissed his forehead briskly, as people who kissed their dogs might do. “I’d like to give you a real kiss, Joey, of a kind you’ve never had. But there just isn’t time. Not right now.”

Her feet in high heels tapped back into the finished rooms of the apartment. The door closed solidly behind her, so only the street lighting, very distant and indirect, reached him now. He could hear vague sounds of movement from the apartment for a little while, then there was silence.

They hadn’t bothered to gag him, so it seemed he was free to yell for help as much as he liked—Johnny hadn’t been gagged either. Well, maybe later he would try.

They hadn’t even bothered to take away his gun.

* * *

The viewer built into Craig Walworth’s back door showed him that Kate Southerland was standing just outside. She looked just about as she had when he had seen her last, blue jacket and all. Without consciously intending to do so, he spoke her name aloud.

His voice was low, but Kate evidently heard him through the door, for at once she rattled its handle.

“Craig?” Her voice coming through the thick wood sounded dazed and empty. “Craig? Let me in, please.” Her image in the viewer appeared dazed too, staring glassily forward as if she could see him through the door.

Taking his eye from the viewer, Walworth turned himself around in a full circle, looking at his brightly lighted kitchen. He did not really see anything of the cheerful colors. His mind was devoid of plans, and he felt that he was waiting for something to be explained to him. When he had turned to face the door once more he tried looking through the viewer again. She was still there, and once more the handle of the door rattled.

“Hell, why not?” he said aloud. “Come in. If you’re a phantom I won’t be able to keep you out anyway, will I?”

It took him a full ten seconds to undo all the alarms and fastenings armoring the door, and then he swung it wide. Kate walked in at once. Before he did anything else he locked the door completely up again. Then he turned to look at her.

She certainly looked real and solid enough, and her confused state was even plainer than it had been through the viewer. Her face was paler than he remembered it, her hands kept rubbing each other nervously, her eyes jumped erratically about the kitchen, looking everywhere but straight at him.

Abruptly she began to speak in a staccato voice. “This place where I’ve been staying—you see, he broke in there today, while it was still daylight. Cloudy, but still so bright when I ran outside that I thought I was going to die.”

“Huh.” He studied Kate’s face desperately, trying to make sure that it was real. If he fired his pistol at it, what would happen? “Somebody broke in on you somewhere, huh?”

“Enoch Winter.” Her empty blue eyes flicked at Walworth, then past him at the stove. “He was looking for the old man, I know. He said—he said Joe had told him where the old man might be sleeping. He looked in all the vaults, I think.”

“Joe,” said Walworth, just to be saying something.

“Yes.” Kate’s eyes fixed on him suddenly. “Do you know where Joe is?”

“I don’t know any Joe, lady,” he said, suddenly remembering who Joe must be.

“I have the feeling that Joe has been here recently.”

“Why in hell should Joe be here?”

“Joe shouldn’t be in hell,” Kate answered instantly—making as much sense, Walworth thought, as anything else she had said so far. She appeared to stop to think. “I don’t know why he should be in this place, then,” she went on. “But he was here.”

“My God.” Walworth was speaking to himself again. “I think it really is Kate. Then there must have been someone who looked just like her in the morgue—someone they found in that rooming house—I don’t know. God, what a day and evening this is turning out to be.”

Kate nodded at him, a wise-old-woman sort of nod that made her look crazier than ever. “You speak of God a lot, don’t you? They can, too, you know. It’s not really like it is in the stories. They can handle holy things. They’re no worse than we are, really.”

“Sure, whatever you say.” Suddenly Walworth remembered leaving the phone off its cradle, back in the other room. Immediately he felt pleased with himself for having his head on so straight now that he remembered that. “Excuse me one second,” he said, and left the kitchen.

Sure enough, there was the loose phone; score one for the consistency of the world and dependability of his brain. He hung it up, not bothering to find out if there was someone on the other end of the line now or not. He could call back later for help if it was necessary, but right now it looked like maybe he was going to fly home from this trip on his own.

On his way back to the kitchen he hoped fiercely that his visitor was still going to be there. She was, he saw with considerable relief, and she still looked like Kate. But a Kate still really out of it, staring now with great apparent interest at the icemaker on his refrigerator door—

Why couldn’t he see her reflection in the chrome?

Some trick of angles—

Going up to the girl, Walworth quietly touched her on the elbow. She started, not at all the way a phantom ought to behave, and turned her quietly wild gaze on him.

Those eyes of hers made him shaky. “Kate, d’you know what? Everyone thinks you’re dead. Hey, now, don’t start flying around outside the window, or do anything silly like that, hey?” He could hear the real pleading in his own voice, and it disgusted him.

She looked at him with a total lack of intelligence. “What?”

“I’m just telling you, don’t do anything silly until I have the chance to show the world that you’re still alive and in one piece. That’s going to get me off one hook, anyway. Now you are here, right?” He squeezed her jacketed elbow. “Sure you are.”

“I’m here. Of course I am.”

“Great. What brings you to my place tonight, anyway? Not that I mind.” His hand, falling back to his side, brushed the butt of the gun still stuck in his belt, and he wondered if it would be smarter now to put the weapon away. He decided to carry it with him a little longer, just in case . . . in case of what, he didn’t exactly know.

“I must find Joe.” Kate’s fine forehead creased in puzzlement. “I went to his apartment tonight, right after sunset, but he’s not there. He’s been here, I can feel it.”

She raised both hands to her head. “Oh, those people drugged me, that night when I was here . . . maybe you . . . but you’re not one of them.”

“No, no I’m not.”

Kate let her hands drop to her sides, and her speech fell back into its earlier lifeless tone. “I think I left something here . . . I didn’t have any money with me when I wanted to go shopping.”

“Shopping. Sure.” Walworth stared at her for a little while. “My God, they really dosed you good, didn’t they? Well, welcome to the club. I knew they were giving you something good that night . . . how many days ago was that? Almost a week, I bet, and you’re still wandering. I hope it’s not the same thing they gave me. God.”

She looked at him as if she were trying hard to understand.

“So, what do I do with you now, Katie? Just call up the cops, I suppose. No, my lawyer first. Then the cops. Tell ‘em you’re here. Say you just wandered in. I know you slightly.”

He decided to take a look around the apartment first, because there were probably a few things he’d rather the cops didn’t see. He had better put the gun away, to begin with—suddenly recalling something else, Walworth turned his back on Kate and walked out of the kitchen again. When he reached his bedroom, the little shot-to-splinters table was lying just as he remembered it, on its side against the wall, dusted with a little plaster from the cratered wall above.

So, the shooting incident had been real enough—except of course he must have been shooting at a drug-induced hallucination. Carol herself had doubtless been long gone before things started to get dangerous. Her idea in drugging him must have been that he would eliminate himself with his own crazed violence—an unreliable method, it would seem, of getting someone out of the way. And why should she want him out of the way anyhow? Maybe this was only her idea fun. He himself, he knew, had some ideas on how to have a good time that would seem far out, to put it mildly, to most people. But Carol and her pal the ape-man must be completely crazy. . . .

He righted the little table. Still, there was no way that the damage wouldn’t be noticed if anyone came into the bedroom. I was cleaning my gun this afternoon, officer, and it just . . . they must hear that pretty often. But still the gun had nothing to do with Kate, or with her brother’s kidnapping. So that would be all right. What he had to do now was show the world that Kate Southerland was still alive. After that, there ought to be lawyers around sharp enough to demonstrate to the world that whatever had been happening to Kate lately was not Craig Walworth’s fault.

But this time, when he got back to the cheerful kitchen, his chronic fear was realized. Kate was gone. No trace of her. And the back door was still locked and bolted from the inside.

Partial relief came with the realization that she must have wandered off somewhere, and still be in the apartment. He found his front door still chained up, too, when his hopeful search for Kate took him that far. He stood in the living room and called her name a few times, tentatively. He was completely certain that that image of Carol, with a hole shot in her dress but not the pink skin of her belly, had been a picture projected out of his own doped mind. That had to be. Tonight’s Kate, though, had looked worn and almost sick, and despite that—or maybe because of it—she had been very real.

Of course Carol, now that he thought about it, never looked all that real anyway. Beautiful, God yes, but . . .

So he went through the whole place once more, calling Kate’s name softly, peering into closets as he went and even under the beds. Doing this made him feel no sillier than anything else he could think of doing.

Once the gun in his belt pinched his belly when he bent over to look under a bed, and he had a sudden almost overpowering impulse to draw it out and put the muzzle to his head and pull the trigger. Would death be a drug-delusion too, an unreal sleep? Was Kate really dead and was he sharing the ultimate bad trip with her? When people got up from the morgue and walked . . .

His doorchime sounded distantly. Someone at the front. The lobby desk should have called up—or had he missed hearing the intercom?

This time he didn’t even bother looking through the viewer first. He just undid the fastenings of the door and opened up, ready to take whatever came.

It was Kate again, standing there dumbly, looking just as she had before.

“How do you do that?” Irritably he reached out and grabbed her by the solid, real jacket sleeve and pulled her into the apartment. “Now stay put, will you, and let me think? I got a head full of shit and I got to try to think. Baby, I’ve got to be sure you’re real before I call the cops to try to show you off.”

“He’s coming after me,” said Kate, in her dazed voice that assigned nothing any gradations of importance.

“He? Who?”

“I went downstairs just now, and there he was, coming along the walk. He wants me to go back with him. Give me orders, put me out of the way somewhere, that’s what he wants. But I’ve got to keep looking for Joe—”

Reality was suddenly as unmistakable as an onrushing truck. “Winter’s coming? Up here?”

“—and he won’t let me go on looking.”

It was quiet enough now that Walworth could hear one of the front elevators running.

He ought to show the world one Enoch Winter, dead, along with one Kate Southerland alive. Winter had forced his way in, trying to attack her. Tell that story, and then let the good lawyers guide him through.

Quickly he closed his front door again, leaving it unlocked. His last look out into the lobby showed him the mirror with its draping raincoat. Show business, he thought.

Waving Kate to stand back, he retreated just a few steps from the door and drew the gun and thumbed the hammer back very silently. He raised it in a two-handed aim, keeping his gaze squarely on the door.

“What are you doing?” Kate’s voice was suddenly changed radically toward the normal, as if the sight of the drawn gun had acted as a tonic shock. “Craig!”

The doorbell chimed. Somehow, with the distraction from Kate, he had missed hearing the sounds of the elevator stopping and opening.

“Who?” he called out sharply. His hands, center-aiming at the door, were very steady.

“Winter,” the deep voice answered.

“No,” Kate whispered, somewhere behind him. “It isn’t. Be careful, don’t shoot.”

“Come in,” Walworth called, his trigger finger very slowly taking up slack. “It’s unlocked.”

The knob turned and the door swung in. Not Winter at all. Almost as tall, but lean. Under an open black topcoat, what looked like a new suit of expensive black. A somehow Christmasy red tie, a fine white shirt. Smiling, jaunty, vigorous, but obviously old.

The old man.

I see now that you would only laugh like an idiot if I tried to tell you his real name.

Walworth fired. Even though he knew, before the gun went off, exactly how much good the bullet was going to do him.