The Sinful Ones

Chapter Seven The Shimmering Garment

Incandescent lights were shining in Carr’s eyes, so bright they made his head ache violently. He jumped about in pain, flapping his arms. It seemed a stupid and degrading thing to be doing, even if he were in pain, so he tried to stop, he tried at least to use his hands to shield his eyes from the merciless light, but he couldn’t. The reason was four ropes tied tight to his wrists and knees. The ropes went up into darkness overhead and were jerking him about, as if he were a puppet.

The ropes turned black, merged with the darkness, disappeared, and collapsed down into something soft and clinging.

Hitching himself up, he realized that he was in his own room, in his own bed, fighting the bedclothes.

He shakily thrust his feet out of bed and sat on the edge of it, waiting for the echoes of his nightmare to stop whirling through his senses, for his skin to lose its hot, tight, tingling feel.

His head ached miserably. Lifting his hand, he felt a large sensitive lump. He recalled the small dark man hitting him.

Pale light was sifting through the window. He got up, went over to the bureau, opened the top drawer. He looked at the three pint bottles of whiskey. He chose the quarter full one, poured himself a drink, downed it, poured another, looked around.

The clothes he had been wearing were uncharacteristically laid out on a chair.

His head began to feel like a whirlpool. He went over and looked out the windows.

But instead of an empty street, open bedroom windows, flapping shades, and the other insignia of dawn, Carr saw a brisk little throng moving along the sidewalks. Windows were mostly lighted and advertisements were blinking. Unwillingly he decided that he must have been unconscious not only last night, but also all of today.

A coolness on his fingers told him that whiskey was dribbling out of the shot glass. He drank it and turned around. A gust of anger at the small dark man (is your friend!) went through him.

Just then he noticed a blank envelope propped up on the mantelpiece. He took it down, snapped on a light, opened it, unfolded the closely scribbled note it contained. It was from Jane.

>I’m sorry about last night. Fred is sorry too, now that he knows who you are. He was hiding in my bedroom and heard the others come in, and he through you were one of them when you came sneaking through.

Don’t try to find me, Carr. It isn’t only that you’d risk your own life. You’d endanger mine. Fred and I are up against an organization that can’t be beaten, only hidden from. If you try to find me, you’ll only spoil my chances.

You want to have a long happy life, get married, be successful, don’t you? You don’t want your future changed, so that you have only a few wretched months or hours ahead of you, before you’re hunted down? Then your only chance is to do what I tell you.

Stay in your room all day. Then arrange your things just as you usually do before going to work in the morning. You must be very exact—a lot depends on it. Above all, burn this letter—on your honor do that. Then dissolve in a glass of water the powders you’ll find on the table beside your bed, and drink them. In a little while you’ll go to sleep and when you wake up, everything will be all right.

Your only chance to get clear of the danger you’re in, and to help me, is to do exactly as I’ve told you. And forget me forever.

<

Carr walked to the bed. On the little table, leaning against an empty tumbler, were two slim paper packets. He felt one between finger and thumb. It gritted. He put it back.

He glanced again at the letter. His head began to ache stabbingly. Why, what sort of a nincompoop did they think he was? And what would she be saying next—“So sorry we had to poison you?” “Don’t try to find me…burn this…on your honor…forget me forever…” What nauseous melodrama! Did she think such cheap phrases would soothe him into putting up with what had happened? Yes, she was romantic, all right—the romantic little dear who throws her arms around you and rubs her belly against yours so her boyfriend can stick a gun in your ribs.

He’d blundered into a pretty nasty affair, and maybe he’d picked the wrong side.

And she did have a reason to lie. She might lie to scare him off, to keep him from discovering what sort of hanky-panky she and he precious small dark man with glasses were up to, maybe to gain time for some sort of getaway. (Don’t stir out of your room today.)

He hurriedly began to throw on his clothes, wincing when the jabs of pain came. After shouldering into his topcoat, he drained the last shot from the whiskey bottle, tossed it back in the drawer, looked at the full bottles a moment, stuck one in his pocket, went out, glaring savagely at the mirror-imprisoned Carr on the stairs.

He walked a half block to the nearest hotel and waited for a cab. Two cruised by with their flags up, but the drivers ignored his arm-wavings and calls. He ground his teeth. Then a third cab approached and this one drew into the curb, but just as he was getting ready to board it, two fur-coated blondes from the hotel swept by him and piled in. He swore out loud, turned on his heel and started walking.

It was a pleasantly mild evening and he detested it. He felt a senseless rage at the people he passed.

How nice it would be to smash all the neon signs, rip down the posters, break into the houses and toss out of the windows the crooning, moaning, blatting radios and televisions. Come the atom bomb!

But for all that, the fresh air was helping his head. As he neared Mayberry Street, he began to calm down, or at least focus his anger.

Halfway down the block a car was parked with its motor softly chugging—a convertible with the top down. Just as he passed it, he saw a man come out of the entry to the Gregg apartment. A rather heavily built man. He strolled off in the opposite direction. But before he turned, Carr had recognized him. Mr. Wilson!

Repressing the apprehension that surged through him, Carr made a snap decision. Stepping rapidly and decisively, he started after Mr. Wilson.

But just then a voice behind him said, “If you value your life or your reason, keep away from that guy.” At the same time a hand gripped his elbow and spun him around.

This time the small dark man with glasses was wearing a black, snap-brim hat and a tightly buttoned trench coat rather too long for him, suggesting a robe. And this time he didn’t look terrified, in spite of his pallor. Instead he was sardonically smiling.

“I knew you wouldn’t stay in your room,” he said. “I told Jane her letter would have just the opposite effect.

Carr doubled his fist, swung back his arm, hesitated. Damn it, he did wear glasses—pitifully think-lensed ones.

“Go ahead,” said the small, dark man. “Make a scene. Bring them down on us. I’m past caring.”

And then he did something astonishing. He threw back his head, raised his arm in a theatrical gesture, and with a certain rakish coolness intoned, “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all.”

Carr stared at the glasses bright with reflected street light.

“Hamlet,” said the small dark man. “Act five, scene two. The first quotation was from The Hound of the Baskervilles.” He paused and studied Carr, his glasses gleaming hypnotically. “You wouldn’t think, would you,” he mused, “that as we stand here in this respectable neighborhood, conversing quietly, that we are both in deadly peril.” He smiled. “No, I’m sure you wouldn’t think that.”

“Listen,” said Carr suddenly, advancing again with baled fist. “You slugged me last night.”

“So I did,” said the small man, rocking on his heels.

“Well, in that case—” Carr started, and then he remembered Mr. Wilson. He whirled around. The portly man was nowhere in sight. He took a few steps, then checked himself abruptly, looked back. The small dark man was rapidly walking toward the purring convertible. Carr darted after him, sprang to the running board just as the other slipped behind the wheel.

“You wanted to distract me until he was gone,” Car accused.

“That’s right,” said the small dark man. “Jump in.”

Angrily Carr complied. But before he could say anything, the other had started to talk. His voice was no longer facetious, but low, bitter, almost confessional. His head was bent. He did not look at Carr.

“In the first place,” he said, “I want you to understand that I don’t trust you. And I certainly don’t like you—if I did, I’d b doing my best to get you out of this instead of leading you straight toward the center. And finally, I don’t give a damn what happens to you, or to myself. But I still do have a certain quixotic concern for what happens to Jane. It’s for her sake, not yours, that I’m going to do what I’m going to do.” He put his hand on the gear-shift lever.

“And what are you going to do?” snapped Carr.

The convertible bucked, leaped forward with a roar.

Carr’s gaze swung up as the grimy red wall of a truck looked higher, higher. WORLD MOVES, the sign said. He closed his eyes. He felt a blood-checking swerve, gritted his teeth at the wood-on-steel caress along the fender. When he opened his eyes again, it was to see a woman and child flash by not a foot from the wheels. He lurched sideways as they screamed around a corner, let go his hat to cling to the car, watched a coupe and bus converge ahead of them, closed his eyes again as they grazed through the gap.

He wasn’t going to die because of any mysterious intrigue-spawned peril. Oh, no! He and the small dark man with glasses were merely going to provide two unusually well-mangled additions to the year’s traffic fatalities.

“Stop, you jerk!”

The other did not take his eyes off the street ahead, but bared his gums in a grin. Crouching there so small and frail behind the wheel, black hat blown off, hair streaming back, face contorted, peering ahead through glasses as thick as telescope lenses, he looked like some spindle-bodied man of the future hurling himself at eternity.

To either side, small indistinguishable stores and dusty white street globes shot by, while blocks of asphalt vanished under the hood.

“Tell me what it’s all about before you kill us,” yelled Carr.

The small dark man snickered through his teeth. “Do I dare explain the universe?”

Ahead of them cars skittered to the curb like disturbed ants. Over the motor’s roar Carr became aware of a wailing that grew in volume. A wild white light, mixed with red, began to flood the street from behind them, its beam swinging back and forth like a giant pendulum. Then from the corner of his eye Carr noticed a seated man in a big black slicker, traveling at a level several feet above him, heave into view, creep abreast. Below and ahead of the man was a bright vermillion hood from which the wailing came. Behind man and hood were dim ladders and coils, other swaying and slickered figures.

Ahead the street took a jog. Cars parked zigzag like a rail fence made it impossible that both their car and the fire engine should get through.

Grinning wider, the small dark man nursed the throttle. The fire engine dropped back a little, hung on tenaciously, dropped back just enough more to let them careen through the gap, while frozen pedestrians gaped.

Carr’s fear left him. There was no use to it.

“You and Jane are both insane, aren’t you?” he screamed.

The small man’s snort seemed to be torn from his lips by the wind.

“That would be nice,” he said.

The street narrowed, its sides grew dark. Behind them the fire engine braked, took a turn.

From ahead came a cold whiff of water and oil. Skyscrapers twinkled against the sky, but just this side of them a gap in the buildings was widening. Immediately ahead a skeletal black structure loomed.

A rapid clanging started. Towers flanking the black structure began to blink red.

Without warning Carr grabbed for the ignition, stamped at the brake. “They’re opening the bridge!” he yelled.

The small man kicked him in the ankle, punched his hand away from the dashboard and accelerated. Ahead was stopped autos, the black-and-white semaphore of a barrier. Swinging far the left, they struck its flexible end. It rasped along the car’s side like a stick against a picket fence, tore free with a great twang. They shot forward onto the dark span. To either side, solidity dropped away. Far below, yellow windows of skyscrapers flowed in uneven patterns on the water. To the left was the dark bulk of a lake freighter with figures moving on the dimly lit bridge. Beside it Carr seemed to glimpse a much smaller hull and the tiny pale oval of a single upturned face.

They were three-quarters of the way across when, through their hurtling speed, Carr felt the feather touch of a titan. Under them the span had begun to rise. Ahead of them a ribbon of blackness appeared, at the break in the jack-knife of the span.

The small dark man clamped the throttle to the floor. There was a spine-compressing jar and jounce, the skyscrapers reeled, then another jar, as the car came down—on its wheels.

The tip of the second barrier broke off with a giant snap. The open bridge had cleared the street ahead of traffic going their way. The small dark man breezed along it for four blocks like the winner of a race, then suddenly braked, skidded around a corner to the wrong side of the street. The two wheels on his side hit the curb and the car rocked to a stop.

Carr loosened his death-grip on dashboard and door-handle, balled a fist, and turned, this time without any compunction about glasses.

But the small man had jumped out of the car and was lightly running up the steps of a building that Carr now realized was the public library. As he hit the sidewalk in pursuit, he saw the small man briefly silhouetted against the yellow rectangle of the swinging door. When Carr stiff-armed through it, the man was vanishing at the top of a flight of marble stairs, under an archway decorated in twinkling gold mosaic with the names of Whittier, Emerson and Longfellow.

Reaching the top, Carr received a spurt of savage pleasure from the realization that he was gaining. Before him was a large, domed room, open shelves to one side, counters and booths to the other, unoccupied except for a couple of girls behind a window and a baldheaded man with a coat and briefcase awkwardly clamped under one arm as he stood on tiptoe to reach down a book.

The small dark man was racing under an archway commemorating the English poets Scott, Burns, Tennyson and Gray.

Carr raced at his heels past a desk behind which sat a starved, grayhaired woman who seemed too timid to look up or too fragile to permit herself quick reflexes. The small man darted toward a wall bearing long golden characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs. He ducked down a narrow corridor and to his shock Carr realized they were both running on frosted glass.

For a moment Carr thought that the small dark man had let him this long chase solely to get him to step through a skylight. Then he realized that he was on one of the many translucent catwalks that served as ashes in the stacks of the library. He sprinted forward again, guided by the sonorous pit-pat of receding footsteps.

He found himself in a silent world within a world. A world several stories high and covering a good part of a block. An oddly insubstantial world of thin metal beams, narrow stairs, translucent runways, and innumerable books. A world of crannies, slits and gaps.

Thus far, Carr had gained. But now, like some animal that has reached its native element, the small dark man held his own, craftily doubling and redoubling on his course, suddenly darting up or down stairs whose treads resounded like the clangor of ancient war. Carr caught glimpses of a flapping raincoat, he shook his fist with anger at some teeth and a grin spied through castellated gaps in successive tiers of books, he clutched futilely at a small, expensive-looking oxford disappearing up a metal-treaded stair in a tantalizing leisurely fashion.

He was panting and his side had begun to hurt, something in his topcoat was growing heavier. It began to seem to him that the chase would never end, that the two of them would go skipping and staggering on indefinitely, always the same distance apart. The whole experience had acquired nightmarish overtones. They were rats scampering through the fact-walled convolutions of some giant metal brain on the far future. They were human specimens awakened too soon in a gigantic time-capsule and frantically seeking escape.

Carr lurched around a corner and there, not ten feet away, back turned, standing beside an old-brass-fitted drinking fountain that gurgled merrily, was his quarry.

Carr almost hiccupped a laugh between his gasps for air. Now, Carr decided, he’d slug the guy.

As he moved forward, however, it was inevitable that he should look beyond the small dark man at the thing at which the small dark man was looking.

Or rather, the person.

For just inside the next alleyway, gilt-buttoned brown suit almost exactly the same shade as the buckram bindings that made a background, lips formed in an eclipse of dismay that couldn’t avoid becoming a smile, stood Jane.

Carr found himself drifting past the small dark man as if the latter were part of a dissolving dream. With every step forward the floor seemed to get solider under his feet.

Jane’s expression did not change and her lips held the same shape. She just tilted her head as he put his arms around her and kissed her.

“Real, real, real,” was the only thought in his head. Real as the Masters of the Chessboard, R. RETI, just beyond her hair, or My System, NIMZOWITCH, beside it.

She pushed away, looking up at him incredulously. His nerves, soothed for a moment, reawoke with a jerk. He stepped back.

“Where’s he gone?” he asked.

“Who?”

“The small dark madman with the glasses.” He moved about quickly, looking down all the nearby aisles.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He has way of fading.”

“I’ll say he has!” He turned on her. “Though generally he tries to murder you first.”

“What!”

“Maybe he thought we had a suicide pact.” Carr grinned woodenly as he said it, but his hands were shaking. He could feel all his delayed reactions to the ride, to his painful awakening earlier, to her exasperating note—coming to the surface.

“Jane,” he said sharply, “what’s it all about?”

She backed away from him, shaking her head.

He followed her. His voice was harsh. “Look, Jane,” he said. “Day before yesterday your boy friend ran away from me. Last night he knocked me out. Tonight he tried to kill both of us. What’s it all about? I want to know.”

She made no answer. The fear in her eyes brought his exasperation to a boil. “What have you and he done? Who are those people after you? What’s wrong with your father and mother? Why did you lead me to that empty house? What are you doing here? You’ve got to tell me, Jane! You’ve got to!”

He had her backed up against the bookshelves and was almost shouting in her face. But she would only stare up at him terrifiedly and shake her head. His control snapped. He grabbed her by her shoulders and shook her violently.

It was a paroxysm of exasperation. He felt as if he were shaking the last two days, with all their enigmas and frustrations. This floppy brown doll in his arms somehow stood for the small man, his car, Miss Hackman, Mr. Wilson, the man with one hand, the whole bedeviled city of Chicago.

But no matter how violently her head snapped back and forth, her lips remained pressed tightly together. Suddenly he loosed her and turned away, resting his elbows on a shelf, burying his face in his hands, breathing heavily.

When he looked up and around she was still backed up against the shelves, smoothing her suit. She bit her lip when her hand touched her shoulder. She was looking at him. “Do I shake well?” she asked. “You know, it’s rather relaxing.”

He winced. “Sorry,” he said dully. “I’m acting crazy. But I’ve just got to know.”

“I can’t tell you.”

He looked at her in a misery of exasperation. “Jane!”

“No, I can’t.”

He submitted wearily. “All right. But…” He glanced around vaguely. “We’ve got to get out of here!” he said, jumping away from the shelves against which he’d been leaning.

“Why?” She was as uncomprehending as before, and much cooler.

“We’re in the stacks.” His voice automatically took on a hushed tone. “No one can come here without a pass. We made enough racket to wake the dead. They’re bound to come looking for us.”

“Are they?” She smiled. “They haven’t yet.”

“And then—Good Lord!—the traffic cops and who knows who else…they’re bound to!” He looked down the long aisles apprehensively.

She smiled again. “But they haven’t.”

Carr turned wondering eyes on her. Something of the charming willfulness of the night before last seemed to have returned to her. Carr felt an answering spirit rising in himself.

And it did seem the height of silliness to worry about being caught breaking library regulations just after you’d escaped messy death a dozen times.

“All right,” he said. “In that case let’s have a drink.” And he fished out of his pocket the unopened pint of whisky.

“Swell,” she said, her eyes brightening. “The fountain’s right here. I’ll get paper cups.”

Carr lowered his cup, half emptied.

“Listen,” he said. “There’s someone coming.”

He hustled Jane to the next aisle, which was unlighted.

The footsteps grew louder, ringing on the glass.

“Let’s go farther back,” Carr whispered. “He might see us here.”

But Jane refused to budge. He peered over her shoulder. “Damn!” he breathed. “I forgot the bottle. He’s bound to spot it.”

Jane’s shoulders twitched.

The he turned out to be a she, as Carr saw by patches through the gapes between the shelves. And a rather remarkable she, with a large, child-of-the-theater face, sleek long black hair cut in bangs across the forehead, and a tight, dark red dress. She walked staccato with a swish.

And she was making faces. Here in the privacy of the stacks, her face—surely it had been composed in childlike dignity back at the counters—was running a remarkable gamut: hatred, horror, smiling contempt, agonized grief, an idiot’s glee, tragic resignation, the magnetism of sex. And not just such fleeting expressions as any neurotic might let slip, but good full-blooded ones, worthy of some cruel Russian princess pacing in her bed-chamber as she contemplated an elaborate revenge against all her seventeen unfaithful lovers.

The expressions succeeded one another regularly, without pause. They looked to Carr rather like an exercise in acting.

The girl walked past their alley, stopped at the second one beyond. She looked up.

“Here we are, boys and girls,” they heard her say to herself in a loud, better voice. “Oh, in six volumes, is it? Is that all he expects at closing time?” She scribbled briefly on a slip of paper she was carrying. “Sorry, Baldy, but—out! You’ll have to learn about the secrets of sex some other day.”

And making a final face, apparently straight at Jane and Carr, she returned the way she had come.

Carr recovered the bottle. “Do you suppose she thought we were doing some research work?”

Jane said lightly, “She looked tolerant.”

She went into the next aisle and returned with a couple of stools. Carr pushed his trenchcoat back over some books. He chuckled. “That was quite an act she put on.”

“All people do that,” Jane said seriously. “As soon as the door closes and they know they’re alone, they begin to act out a little drama. Each person has his own, which he’s made up. It may be love, fear, hate—anything. Sometimes it’s very broad and melodramatic or farcical, sometimes it’s extremely subtle and restrained. But everyone has one.”

“How can you know,” Carr asked, half humorously, “if they only do it when they’re sure they’re alone?”

“I know,” said Jane simply. For a moment they were silent. Then Jane moved nervously. “Let’s have another drink.”

Carr filled their cups. It was rather shadowy where they were. Jane reached up and tugged a cord. Light spilled around them. There was another pause.

Carr said, “Well, since you won’t tell me about yourself yet…” He made it half a question; she shook her head, turning away, “…I have something to tell you.” And he told her how he had spied on Miss Hackman and Mr. Wilson at General Employment and in the tobacco store.

That captured her attention, all right. She sat tensely.

“You’re sure they didn’t spot you?” she pressed when he was done. “You’re sure she meant it when she said she’d found nothing suspicious?”

“As sure as can be,” he told her, “knowing as little as I do. Anyway, I was bothered and I wanted to warn you. I went to the place where I’d left you the night before. Of course, it knocked me for a loop to see a ‘for sale’ sign, but then by the merest luck I found a paper you’d dropped, which happened to have your right address on it…”

“I know.”

“How?” He looked at her.

She hesitated. Then, “Because I was watching you,” she admitted, dropping her eyes. “I hadn’t intended to tell you that.”

“You were watching me?”

“Yes. I thought you might go back there, trying to find me again, and I was worried.”

“But where were you?” He still hardly believed her.

“Inside. Watching through a crack in one of those boarded-up windows. I found a way in.”

He stared at her. “But if you came back on my account, why didn’t you come out when you saw me?”

“Oh, I didn’t want you to find me,” she explained naively. “I’m doing my best to keep you out of this, though I know it doesn’t exactly look that way. I’m afraid there’s an unscrupulous part of my mind that’s working against me and keeps trying to draw you in.” Again she looked down. “I suppose it was that part of my mind that made me accidentally drop the envelope with the address where you’d remember it And before that, write that silly note about the lion’s tail and the five sisters.”

He looked at her a while longer. Then, with an uncomprehending sigh, he continued. “So I went over to your place.”

“I know,” she interrupted. “I followed you.”

He dropped his hands on his knees, leaned forward. “And still you didn’t—”

“Oh, no,” she assured him. “I didn’t want you to see me. I was just anxious.”

“But then you must know all the rest,” he expostulated. “How I finally went upstairs and how Miss Hackman and Mr. Wilson came and…”

“Yes,” she said. “As soon as that happened I ran around and went up the back stairs. I found Fred and you…”

“Fred?”

“The small dark man with glasses. I found you in the bedroom. He’d just hit you. Miss Hackman and Mr. Wilson were killing Gigolo in the front hall…”

“Your cat?”

She shut her eyes. “Yes.” She went on after a moment. “I told Fred who you were and we carried you down the back way to his car and…”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “How did your friend Fred happen to be there in the first place? I got the impression you hadn’t been in that room of yours for months.”

“Oh,” she said uncomfortably, “Fred has very queer habits, a sort of morbid sentimentality about me. He often goes to my room, though I’m not there. Don’t’ ask me any more about that now.”

“All right, so you carried me down to your car,” he said. “Then—?”

“We found your address in your pocketbook and drove you back to your room and carried you up, using your key and put you to bed. I was worried about you, I wanted to stay though I know I shouldn’t, but Fred said you’d be all right, so…”

“…you departed,” he finished for her, “after writing me this charming little note.” And he fished it out of his pocket.

“I asked you to burn that,” she said.

“How do you suppose I felt, waking up?” he asked her. “Happy about it all? Oh yes, and you left those powders too—no, I didn’t bring them with me—those powders I was supposed to swallow so trustfully…”

“You should have,” she cut in. “Really you should have. Don’t you see, Carr, I’m trying to keep you out of this? If you only knew what I’d give to be in a position where I could still keep out of it.” She broke off.

He refused to be moved by the intensity of feeling she had revealed. “You’ve talked a lot about ‘this,’ Jane,” he said deliberately, leaning back. She looked at him frightenedly. “Now it’s time you really told me something,” he continued. “Just what is ‘this’?”

A bell clanged. They both started.

She relaxed. “Closing time,” she explained.

Carr shrugged. The fact they were in the stacks of the Chicago Public Library had become inconsequential to him. “Just what is ‘this’?” he stared to repeat.

“How did you get down here tonight?” she interrupted quickly, looking away.

“All right,” he said, meaning that he was patient and his own question could wait. He refilled both their cups. Then, without hurrying, he told her about going back to the apartment on Mayberry and meeting Fred. Revisualizing the ride shook him, though its details were beginning to seem incredible.

And it seemed to shake Jane too. Though when he finished he realized it was anger which was making her tremble.

“Oh, the coward,” she breathed. “The awful coward. Pretending to be gallant, pretending to sacrifice his own feelings ,even to the point of bringing you to me—but really just doing it to hurt me, because he knew I had done my best to keep you out of this. And then on top of it all, taking chances with your life, hoping that you would both die while he was being noble!” Her lips curled. “No, he doesn’t love me any more, unless morbidness and self-torment count for love. I don’t think he ever did.”

“But why do you go with him then?”

“I don’t,” she replied unhappily. “Except that he’s the only person in the whole world to whom I can go and…” Again she broke off.

“Are you sure of that, Jane?” His voice was low. His hand touched her sleeve.

She pulled her arm away. “Why don’t you go away, Carr?” she pleaded, eyeing him with a kind of wild fright. “Why don’t you drink the powders and forget? I don’t want to drag you down. You’ve got a job and a woman and a life, a path through the world laid out for you. You don’t have to walk into the darkness, the meaninglessness, the chaos, the black machine.”

The lights in the stacks began to wink off, all but the one above their heads.

“Another drink?” she asked in a small voice.

There wasn’t much left in the bottle when he’d filled the cups. She accepted hers absently, looking beyond him. Her face seemed incredibly tiny now, as she sat hunched on her stool, her brown suit shading into the background. The stacks were silent; the mutter of the city was inaudible. In all directions the aisles stretched off into darkness, from their single light. All around them was the pressure of the hundred of thousands of books. But always the gaps between the books, the tunneling slits, the peepholes.

“Look at it from my point of view, Jane,” Carr said. “Just how maddening it seems. I know you’re running away from something horrible. Fred is, too. I know there’s some kind of organization I never dreamed of loose in the world, and that it’s threatening you. I know there’s something terribly wrong with your parents. But what? I can’t even make a guess. I’ve tried to make things fit together, but they won’t. Just think, Jane—you coming to me in terror…that slap right out in the open…your warning…Miss Hackman searching my desk…the words I overheard about ‘checking on you’ and ‘having fun’…” Jane shuddered. He went on, “Those crazy notes you’d made on the envelope…the queer piano in your folks’ place…your mother crazily pretending you were there or whatever it was…your father humoring her, or crazily pretending to…Miss Hackman and Mr. Wilson busting in, ignoring them, acting as if they weren’t alive…more talk about ‘checking’ and ‘fun’ and a ‘beast’ and some sort of threatening ‘other groups’—all the while acting as if the rest of humanity were beneath contempt…and then the cat…and Fred almost killing me…and his wild, fatuous talk tonight about ‘deadly peril’ and so on…and that insane ride…and now you hiding here in the stacks of the Chicago Public Library…”

He shook his head hopelessly.

“They just won’t fit into any pattern, no matter how crazy.” He hesitated. “And then two or three times,” he went on, frowning, “I’ve had the feeling that the explanation was something utterly inconceivable, something far bigger, more dreadful—”

“Don’t,” she interrupted. “Don’t ever let yourself start thinking about it that way.”

“At any rate, don’t you see why you’ve got to tell me about it, Jane?” he finished.

For a moment there was silence. Then she said, “If I tell you about it, that is, if I tell you partly about it, will you promise to go and do what I asked you in the note? So you can escape?”

“No. I won’t promise anything until after you’ve told me.”

There was another silence. Then she sighed, “All right, I’ll tell you partly. But always remember that you made me do it!” She paused, then began, “About a year-and-a-half ago I met Fred. There was nothing serious between us. We just used to meet in the park and go for walks. My father and mother didn’t know about him. I used to spend most of the time working at the piano, and I was going to music school. I didn’t know then that those three—Miss Hackman and Mr. Wilson and Dris—were after Fred. He hadn’t told me anything. But then one day they saw us together. And because of that, because those three had linked me with Fred, my life was no longer safe. I had to run away from home. Since then I’ve lived as I could, here, there, I’ve tried to be inconspicuous, I’ve made notes to remind me what I must and mustn’t do, I’ve stayed in places like this, talked to no one, slept in parks, empty apartments…”

“But that’s impossible.”

“It’s true. For a time I managed to escape them. Then a week ago they stared to close in on me. When I went to your office I was desperate. I went there because someone I knew long ago worked there…”

“Tom Elvested?”

“Don’t interrupt. But then I saw you, I saw you weren’t busy and I went to you. I knew it was my last chance. And you helped me, you pretended…” She hesitated. “That’s all,” she finished.

“Oh, Jane,” Carr said, after a moment, as one might say to a schoolchild who hasn’t prepared her lesson, “you haven’t told me anything. What—” But his voice lacked its former insistence. He was getting tired now, tired of pushing things, of straining after facts. He wanted…He hardly knew what he wanted. He divided the rest of the liquor between them, but it was hardly more than a sip. “Look, Jane,” he said, making a last weary effort, “won’t you trust me? Won’t you stop being so frightened? I do want to help you.”

She looked at him, not quite smiling. “You’ve been awfully nice to me, Carr,” she said. “You’ve give me courage and a little forgetfulness—the Custer’s Last Stand bar, the music store, the movie, the chess, the touching by the gate. I’ve been pretty rotten to you. I’ve made use of you, exposed you to dangers, left you hurt, dragged you back by unconscious tricks into my private underworld. If you knew the real situation, I think you’d understand. But that’s something I’ll have to battle out myself. It’s honestly true what I wrote you in that note, Carr. You can’t help me, you can only spoil my chance of escape.” She looked down. “It isn’t because I think you can help me that I keep drawing you back,” she added, and paused.

“There are two kinds of people in the world, Carr. The steadies and the waifs. The steady knows where he and his world are going. The waif sees only darkness. She knows a secret about life that locks her away forever from happiness and rest. You’re really a steady, Carr. That woman you told me about who wants you to succeed, she’s a steady too. It’s no use helping a waif, Carr. No matter how tender-hearted she may be, how filled with good intentions, there’s something destructive about her, something akin to the darkness, something that makes her want to destroy other people’s certainties and faiths, lead them to the precipice and then point down and say, ‘See? Nothing!’ And there’s nothing you can do for me, nothing at all.”

Carr shook his head. “I can help,” he persisted.

“No.”

“Oh, but Jane, don’t you understand? I really want to help you.” He started to put his arm around her, but she quickly got up.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, following her.

She turned, putting her hand between them. She had trouble speaking. “Go away, Carr. Go away right now. Go back to that wonderful new business you told me about and that woman who wants you to have it. Forget everything else. I thought it would be fun to be with you for an evening, to pretend that things were different—I was insane! Every minute you stay with me, I’m doing you a wrong. Please go, Carr.”

“No.”

“Then stay with me for a little while. Stay with me tonight, but go away tomorrow.”

“No.”

They stood facing each other tautly for a moment. Then the tension suddenly sagged. Carr rubbed his eyes and exclaimed, “Dammit, I wish I had a drink.”

Jane’s eye suddenly twinkled. Carr sensed an abrupt change in her. She seemed to have dropped her cloak of fear and thrown around her shoulders another garment, which he couldn’t identify, except that it shimmered. Even before she spoke, he felt his spirits rising in answer to hers.

“Since you won’t recognize danger and go, let’s forget it for tonight,” was what she told him. “Only, you must promise me one thing.” Her eyes gleamed strangely. “You must believe that I am…magic, that I have magical powers, that while you are with me, you can do anything you want to in the world and it can’t do anything to you, that you’re free as an invisible spirit. You promise? Good. And now I believe you said you wanted a drink.”

He followed her as if she were some fairy-tale princess as she went three aisles over, pulled on a light, took down from an upper shelf three copies of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, stuck her hand into the gap, and brought out a fifth of scotch.

“I put it here two months ago,” she said. “That was when I realized that solitary drinking was a bad thing.” Suddenly she set the bottle down, shook him, cried, “You’re risking your life by your stubbornness, do you understand that? What we’re doing is horribly dangerous. I don’t care, I want to, but still it’s horribly dangerous. Do you understand?”

But his eyes were on the bottle of scotch. “Do you live down here?” he demanded.

She laughed helplessly and let go of him. “In a way. Would you like to see?” And recklessly pulling out handfuls of other books so that they thudded on the floor, she showed him a pack-rat accumulation of cosmetics, showy jewelry, bags of peanuts and candy, cans of gourmet food and an opener, boxes of crackers, loose handkerchiefs, gloves, scarves, all sorts of little boxes and bottles, cups, plates, and glasses.

Taking two of the latter, crystal, long-stemmed, she said, “And now will you have a drink with me, in my house?”