Waltz Into Darkness

17

How long he sat and stared at it he did not know. Time lost its meaning. Reading over and over the same words. “The handwriting of an unknown person. Of an unknown person. An unknown person.” Until they became like a whirring buzz saw slashing his brain in two.

Then suddenly hypnosis ended, panic began. He flung himself out of his swivel-backed chair, so that it fell over behind him with a loud clatter. He crushed the letter into his pocket, in such stabbing haste as if it were living fire and burned his fingers at touch.

He ran for the door, forgetting his hat. Then ran back for it, then ran for the door a second time. In it he collided with his office boy, drawn to the entryway just then by the sound the chair had made. He flung him almost bodily aside, gripping him by both shoulders at once; fled on, calling back “Tell Jardine to take over, I’ve gone home for the day!”

In the street, he slashed his upraised arm every which way at once, before, behind him, sideward, like a man combatting unseen gnats, hoping to draw a coach out of the surrounding emptiness. And when at last he had, after a moment that seemed an hour of agonized waiting, he had run along beside it, was in before it had stopped; standing upright in the middle of it like a latter-day charioteer, leaning over the driver’s shoulder in the crazed intensity of giving him the address.

“St. Louis Street, and quickly! I must get there without delay!”

The wheel spokes blurred into solid disks of motion, New Orleans’ streets began to stream backward around him, quivering, like scenes pictured on running water.

He struck his own flank, as if he were the horse. “Quicker, coachman! Will you never get there?”

“We’re practically flying now, sir. We apt to run down somebody.”

“Then run down somebody and be damned! Only get me there!”

He jumped from the carriage as he had entered it, slapped coins from his backward-reaching palm into the driver’s forward-reaching one, ran for his own door as if he meant to hurl himself bodily against it and crash it down.

Aunt Sarah opened it with surprising immediacy. She must have been right there in the front hall, on the other side of it.

“Is she in?” he flung into her face. “Is she here in the house?”

“Who?” She drew back, frightened by the violence of the question. But then answered it, for it could refer to only one person. “Miss Julia? She been gone all afternoon. She tole me she going shopping, she be back in no time. That was ’bout one o’clock, I reckon. She ain’t come back since.”

“My God!” he intoned dismally. “I was afraid of that. Damn that letter for not coming an hour earlier!”

Then he saw that a young girl was huddled there waiting on a backless seat against the wall. Frugally dressed, a large boxed parcel held in her lap. She was shrinking timidly back, her wan face coloring painfully as a result of the recent expletive he had used.

“Who’s this?” he demanded, lowering his voice.

“Young lady from the dressmaker’s, sent over to have Miss Julia try on a dress they making for her. She say she tole her to be here at three. She been waiting a couple hours now.”

Then she didn’t intend to remain away today, in the ordinary course of events, flashed through his mind. And her doing so now proves—

“When was this appointment made?” he challenged the girl, causing her to cower still further.

“Some... some days ago,” she faltered. “I believe last week, sir.”

He ran up the stairs full tilt, oblivious of appearances, hearing behind him Aunt Sarah’s tactful whisper, “You better go now, honey. Some kind of trouble coming up; you call back some other day.”

He stood there in their bedroom, breathing hard from the violence of his ascent but otherwise immobile for a moment, looking about in mute helplessness. His eye fell on the trunk. The trunk that had never been opened. Draped deceptively, but he knew it now, since that Sunday, for what it was. He wrenched off the slip cover, and the initials came to view again. “J.R.,” in paint the color of fresh blood.

He turned, bolted out again, ran down the stairs once more. Only part of the way this time, stopping halfway to the bottom.

The young apprentice was at the door now, in the act of departing; turning over to Aunt Sarah the boxed parcel. “Tell Mrs. Durand I’m... I’m sorry to have misunderstood, and I’ll come back tomorrow afternoon at the same time, if that’s convenient.”

“Run out and fetch me a locksmith!” he called out from mid-stairs, shattering their low-voiced parting interview like an explosive shell. The timid emissary whisked from sight, and Aunt Sarah tried to close the door on her with one hand and at the same time come away from it in fulfillment of his order.

Then he changed his mind again before she could carry out the errand. “No, wait! That would take too long. Bring me a hammer and a chisel. Have we those?”

“I reckon so.” She scurried for the back.

When she’d handed them to him, he sped upward from sight again. He dropped to his knees, launched himself at the trunk with vicious energy, his mouth a white scar; he inserted the chisel in the crevice about the lock, began to pound at it mercilessly. In a moment or two the lock had sprung open, dangled there half-severed from its recent mounting.

The fall of the hammer and chisel made a dull clank in the new stillness of the room, like a funereal knell.

He plucked down the side-latchpieces, unbuckled the ancient leather strap that had bound it about the middle, rose and heaved as he rose, and the slightly domed lid came up and swung rearward with a shudder.

There was an exhalation of mothballs, as if an active breath had blown in his face.

It was the trunk of a neat, a fastidious, a prissy person. Symmetrical stacks of belongings, each one not so much as a hairsbreadth out of line and the crevices between artfully stopped with handkerchiefs and such slighter articles, so that the various mounds could not become displaced in transit.

The top tray held only intimate undergarments, of both day- and night-wear; all of them utilitarian rather than beautiful. Yellow flannel nightrobes, flannel petticoats, thick woollen articles of covering with drawstrings whose nature he did not try to discover.

In a moment his hands had ravaged it beyond recognition.

He shifted the upper section aside, and found neatly spread layers of dresses beneath that. Of a more sober nature than any she had bought since coming here; browns and grays, with prim little rounded white collars, black alpacas, an occasional staid plaid of dark blue or green, no brighter hue.

He picked the topmost one out at random, then added a second one.

He stood there, full length like that, between them, helplessly holding one up in each hand, looking from one to the other.

Suddenly his gaze caught his own reflection, in the full-length mirrored panel facing her wardrobe door. He stepped out more fully from behind the trunk, looked again. Something struck his eye as being wrong. He couldn’t tell what it was.

He drew a step back with the two trophies, to gain added perspective. Then suddenly, at the shift, it exploded into recognition. There was too much of each dress. He was holding his hands, the hands that held them, at his own shoulder level. They fell away straight to the floor, and, touching it, even folded over in excess.

In memory he saw her stand beside him again, in the mirror. She appeared there for a moment, in brief recapture. The top of her head just rising over the turn of his shoulder: when her hair was up.

He dropped the two wraithlike rags, almost in fright. Stepped to the wardrobe, flung both panels of it wide, with two hands at once. Empty; a naked wooden bar running barren across its upper part. A little puff of ghostly violet scent, and that was all.

This discovery was anticlimactic to the one that had just preceded it, somehow. His real fright lay in the dresses that were here, and not the dresses that were gone.

He ran out again to the stairs, and bending to be seen from below, called to Aunt Sarah, until she had come running in renewed terror. “Yes sir! Yes sir!”

“That girl. What did she leave here? Was that something of Mrs. Durand’s?”

“New dress they running up for her.”

“Bring it here. Hand it up to me, quick!”

He ran back to the room with it, burst the cardboard open, rifled it out. Gay, sprightly; heliotrope ribbons at its waist. His eye took no note of that.

He retrieved the one from the trunk he had dropped to the floor. He flattened it on the bed, smoothing it out like a paper pattern, spreading the sleeves, drawing down the skirt to its full length.

Then he superimposed the new one, the one just delivered, atop it. Then stood back and looked, already knowing.

At no point did the one match the other. The sleeves were longer, by a full cuff-length. The bosom was fuller, spilling out in an excess curve at either side when rendered two dimensional. The waist was almost half again as wide. The wearer of the one could not have entered the other. And most glaring of all the skirt of one reached in a wide band of continuation far below, broad inches below, where the other had ended.

There was only one length for all skirts, even he knew that; floor-length. There was no such thing as a skirt other than floor-length. Any variation in length was not due to fashion, it was due to the height of the wearer.

And in this undersized, topmost one there still twinkled the pins of her living measurements as he had known her, taken from her very body less than a week ago, waiting for the final sewing.

The clothes from St. Louis—

The color slowly drained from his face, and there was a strange sort of fear in his heart that he’d never known before. He’d already known when he came into this house, a while ago; but now, in this moment, he’d proved it, and there was no longer any escaping from the proof.

The clothes from St. Louis were the clothes of someone else.