Dark on the Other Side (9 page)

Gordon Randolph had excelled at half a dozen different
careers. Michael wondered why he had never gone on the stage. He had an
actor’s instinct for a good, punchy line of dialogue.

Then Michael shook his head, as his habitual sense of
fairness reproached him. Gordon didn’t have to dramatize the situation.
It was theatrical enough. And he, Michael, had provoked that simple,
shocking punch line. He had more or less set it up. Nobody could resist
a line like that one.

“Six months ago she tried to kill me.”

The man has guts, Michael thought. He’s still there—not
only in the same house, but right in the next room.

Gordon’s description of that incredible event hadn’t been
theatrical at all; if anything, it had been understated. But Michael’s
writer’s imagination had not required any details. He could picture it
only too vividly: to wake from a sound sleep to see, standing over you,
a figure out of a nightmare—or out of a Greek tragedy, a figure with
the terrifying beauty and malignancy of Medea, arm upraised, knife
poised to strike—and to know that the would-be killer was your own
adored wife…. No wonder primitive people had believed in demoniacal
possession.

Because he had the muscles of an athlete and the
quickness of a cat, Randolph had survived the encounter, but he still
bore the mark of it, a long, puckered scar along his forearm. Michael’s
insistent imagination presented him with another picture that was even
worse than the first. To wrestle for your very life with some Thing
that had the cunning and strength of the insane, and yet the familiar
soft body of the woman you loved; held back by fear of hurting the
beloved, but knowing that if you failed to hold her, the Other would
have your life. Demoniac possession? God, yes, surely that was how you
would think of it, despite the centuries of rational skepticism that
had supposedly killed that superstition.

The soup on the bottom of the pan was scorched. Michael’s
food always was; he cooked everything at top heat. He ate absently,
without noticing the taste. There was a bad taste in his mouth anyhow.
That house—that sick, evil house…

He paused, the spoon dripping unnoticed onto his knee, as
his mind grappled with this new and absorbing notion. Evil. Now why had
he thought of that word? It was a concept he avoided because it was at
once too simple and too complex—meaningless, he would have said once.
And yet, during that whole weekend, the word had come up again and
again. They had all used it, talked about it.

A thud and then a clatter came from the dark kitchen, and
Michael jumped and swore as he noticed the puddle of soup on his
trouser leg. He put the spoon back into the pan and swabbed
ineffectually at the spot with his hand. That only made it worse. Then
he looked up, glaring, as the pad of heavy paws announced the arrival
of Napoleon.

The cat stood in the doorway, returning Michael’s glare
with interest. He was an enormous animal, as big as a small dog, and
uglier than any dog Michael had ever met. His ancestry must have
included cats of every color, for his fur was a hideous blend of every
hue permitted to felines—orange, black, brown, white, gray, yellow, in
incoherent patches. Now he looked leprous, having lost a good deal of
fur in his encounters with other tomcats. One ear was pretty well gone,
and a scar on one side of his whiskered countenance had fixed his jaws
into a permanent maniacal grin. From the glow in his yellow eyes,
Michael deduced that he had just returned from another victory. After a
moment, Napoleon nodded to himself, sat down, lifted his back leg into
an impossible position, and began licking his flank.

“Don’t bleed on the rug,” Michael said automatically.

Napoleon looked up from his first aid, gave Michael a
contemptuous stare, and returned to his labors. Michael returned to his
thoughts, which were considerably less pleasant than Napoleon’s.

Homicidal mania. They didn’t call it that nowadays, did
they? Paranoia? Schizophrenia? He shook his head disgustedly. Gordon
was right: words, words, words. They meant nothing to a man whose wife
had tried to kill him.

Evil. Another word, but it was a word rooted deep in
human experience; it satisfied the demand for understanding more than
did the artificial composites of a new discipline. It had the solid
backing of centuries of emotional connotations. It brought back
references from every literary source from Holy Writ to Fu Manchu. Out
of this accumulation of literary and racial memory, one quotation came
to Michael’s mind:

Nobody ever expressed an idea quite as aptly as
Shakespeare. But in this case the evil was not approaching. It was
already there—in that house.

Napoleon finished his ablutions and stalked over to lean
heavily on Michael’s leg. It was his only means of expressing an
emotion, which Michael, in his softer moments, liked to interpret as
affection. Someone had once said of that hard-bitten monarch, Henry
VII, that he was not, to put it mildly, uxorious. In the same vein of
irony one might say of Napoleon that he was not a lap cat. He did lean,
occasionally, and his weight being what it was, the effect was
noticeable. Michael got up with a weary sigh and extracted a can of cat
food from the supply on the shelf. Affection? Gluttony, rather.
Napoleon applied himself to supper with uncouth gulps, and Michael
wandered back to the couch.

Not even the cat, for whom he felt a sneaking fondness
compounded with envy, could distract him from the black current of his
thoughts. How the hell could he write a biography of a man who was as
hagridden as Gordon Randolph without tearing the man’s soul to bloody
shreds? Especially if he went on in this vein of half-baked mysticism.
Evil deeds, evil men, he had said—but Evil, in the abstract? If there
was evil in the beautiful house, it had to emanate from some living
individual.

There weren’t that many candidates. The revolting old
woman, Andrea, was one of them; she was a constant visitor, and she was
crazy as a loon. Michael wondered how genuine her belief in witchcraft
was. Ninety-nine percent, he thought. What other hang-ups did she have?
Certainly the old woman’s blend of malice and superstition was not a
healthy influence; but how profoundly had it really affected Linda
Randolph? Had Andrea implanted her own insane ideas, or merely
strengthened neuroses that had already begun to form? Even insanity has
its own brand of logic. The paranoid schizophrenic may kill a complete
stranger, suddenly and seemingly without cause; but in terms of the
murderer’s delusion, his action makes perfectly good sense. As the
object of a widespread conspiracy aimed at his life and reason, he is
only acting in self-defense when he kills one of the conspirators. Was
that why Linda had attacked her husband? Could such a delusion have
been planted by a third party—such as Andrea?

Then there was Briggs, the fat little man who looked like
a moribund pig. Physiognomy was not a science. Under his pale, pudgy
façade, Briggs might have the soul of a saint. But Michael
doubted it. Briggs’s feelings toward the Randolphs were obvious. He
idolized his employer and resented—because he desired—his employer’s
wife. Which was natural. Randolph had been modestly vague about the
circumstances that had brought Briggs to his present post, but Michael
had got the impression of persecution, a miscarriage of justice, the
loss of a profession for which the man had prepared all his life.
Briggs wasn’t the type to square his shoulders and march back out into
the arena after someone had kicked him where it hurt. Randolph’s offer
of a job might, literally, have saved his life. No wonder the little
man admired his boss. His attitude toward Linda was equally
comprehensible, if less attractive. Malice—plenty of it. Michael
wondered whether Gordon was too damned high-minded to see how his
secretary felt about his beautiful wife. But Briggs’s brand of feeble
frustration was not evil, not in the sense Michael meant.

Randolph? Michael dismissed that hypothesis not because
of Randolph’s charm and talent but because of a fact that stood as
solidly as Mount Everest. Randolph was genuinely, desperately, in love
with his wife. Although Michael had interviewed a lot of people, he
couldn’t always tell the truth from the assumed; but in this case he
would have staked his reputation on the genuineness of Randolph’s
feelings.

All of which led straight back to the most obvious source
of evil. Linda herself.

Now, there, surely, he was out of his depth and could
candidly admit the fact. God damn it, he wasn’t a psychiatrist. Nobody
but a professional had the right to speculate about a mental condition
as severe as Linda’s. He couldn’t even consult a professional. It would
be an unforgivable violation of friendship.

But the idea remained, dangling like a shiny toy in the
forefront of his mind, and for a few minutes he played with it. Often
in his biographical research he had talked to Galen Rosenberg about the
personalities of his subjects. Rosenberg had been one of his father’s
best friends, and Michael would have appreciated his pithy comments
even if he had not been one of the top psychiatrists in the east. His
humility and his sardonic sense of humor were as great as his
all-embracing tolerance. It was a pity Gordon couldn’t convince his
wife to see Galen. If anyone could help her…

Michael shook his head. He was busy-bodying again, and if
he had learned anything in the course of his thirty-three years, it was
the futility of trying to force help on people who didn’t want it. No,
he couldn’t discuss the case with Galen, not even under pseudonyms. His
problem was not Linda’s neuroses, it was a question of his own
professional competence. Could he do a decent job with Randolph’s life
without mentioning the fact that Randolph’s wife had tried to kill him?
Another of those simple questions that weren’t simple at all.

The answer, like the question, could be phrased with
paradoxical simplicity. Michael realized, with a slight shock, that the
answer was not the one he had hoped to get. He was a professional, and
a good one; on that theme he had no false modesty whatever. Already
sentences were framing themselves in his mind, possible lines of
investigation were taking shape; the subject fascinated him as a
problem, all personal ties aside. Oh, sure, there would be sticky
moments, places were he would have to walk carefully, but they were
only part of the challenge of the job. He could do it, all right. And
he wanted to do it. And he didn’t want to do it.

Michael bounded to his feet with a snarl, knocking two
issues of
Mad,
an
American Historical
Review,
and approximately two weeks of the
New
York Times
off the coffee table, and evoking an answering
growl from Napoleon, who was crouched on the rug by the front door. It
was his favorite place. What he was waiting for, Michael never knew,
though he wasted a lot of time speculating. Other cats? Not people.
Napoleon hated people, all people, and departed via the window whenever
a visitor approached.

“Why the hell I don’t get a nice friendly dog, I don’t
know,” Michael said aloud. “I could talk to it and get an answer now
and then. I can’t even kick you to relieve my spleen. You’d wait till I
was asleep and then come in and tear my throat out. Who do you think
you are, squatting there by the door? A watchdog? A lion? A vulture?
God damn it, I hope that old saw about animals reflecting the
personalities of their owners isn’t true. You make me look like some
kind of nut.”

Having thus relieved his spleen, he stalked toward the
bedroom, shedding coat, tie, and shirt as he went. Napoleon settled
back on his haunches muttering to himself. The eerie sound followed
Michael all the way into the bedroom, and he kicked the dresser in
passing. Why couldn’t the cat purr like an ordinary feline? This sound
wasn’t quite a growl, but it certainly wasn’t a purr; Napoleon never
expressed approval in that traditional fashion. He never expressed
approval at all. He just sat around muttering to himself. A helluva pet
for a poor miserable bachelor…

No pets. No animals at all, on the whole expansive twenty
acres of Randolph’s estate. Surely that was not coincidental. You’d
expect a man like Randolph to ride and hunt, to keep dogs.

Michael turned out the light and pulled the crumpled
sheet up to his chin. He liked to consider himself above such
considerations as physical comfort, but his uncooperative body
remembered the smoothness of the sheets at the Randolph house, and the
yielding yet firm surface of the mattress. Surely this mattress had
grown another lump since the last time he slept on it. He wriggled,
trying to find a smooth spot. No use. The damned mattress grew tumors,
like protoplasm….

There was no clue to Randolph’s personality in the
absence of animals; that was a pretty corny old cliché. A lot of
nice people didn’t like dogs. There were such things as allergies, too.
And…of course. Linda Randolph’s neurosis had to do with animals.
Randolph couldn’t have a dog on the place when the sight of an
imaginary one sent his wife into fits. So much for the subtle
analytical biographer’s insight.

Michael gave up his search for comfort and lay staring up
at the ceiling, hands clasped under his head. The dirty yellow light
from the street filtered in through panes grimy with city dirt, past
the cracks in the wooden slats of the ancient blind. Sounds filtered
in, too—the soft drizzle of the rain and the hooting, honking blare of
traffic. Even at this late hour there were cars on the city streets.
Soon the trucks would begin their nightly deliveries, but he wouldn’t
hear them; his ears had become inured to the grind of brakes and the
vibration that was gradually eroding the fabric of buildings and
pavements. He was used to the sounds and the grime and the press of
human beings. They were part of his habits; without them he probably
couldn’t work. Yearning for apple blossoms and fresh country air and
crocuses (crocuses?) pushing their tender green tips through the damp
brown earth—sentimental nonsense, that was what it was. A nice place to
visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.