Psyche (8 page)

Holding a cigarette in one hand, attempting to quiet the muscle in his cheek with the other, he stared blankly ahead into the night, and tried to think of what he might still do to recover the ground he had lost.

He had very little money, and he swore violently under his breath when he thought of what he had spent on the cottage and the provisions now beyond his reach for all time. On the credit side he still had the car and the child. His main objective must be to find a place where he could hide, and it seemed to him that the further he went the more safely might he accomplish this. Somewhere
to the south of him lay not only the city but the lake with its almost continuous chain of towns running both east and west. The only hole that would stay open for long in the net which would soon be spread out to catch him was to the north where, no more than four hundred miles away, civilization, as such, met and was defeated by the great, rolling tides of the northern forests. On the fringes of this wilderness he should be able to find a temporary sanctuary where, for a small price, no awkward questions would be asked.

He looked at the luminous dial of his watch. Thinking it must have stopped, he put it to his ear, heard its steady tick, and was forced to believe, although it seemed fantastic, that it was no later than nine o'clock. That he should have a greater margin of time than he had thought did a lot to restore his confidence, and the quite reasonable assumption that the child had not yet been missed made him feel almost safe again.

By God, he thought, taking a deep breath, he'd beat the bastards yet. Let them find out, as they probably would—bloody nosey-parkers that they were—that he had done it. They could trace him to the cottage and think how bloody smart they were, but they weren't going to be smart enough to get him and the kid. They could have the kid when they were ready to kiss good-bye to two hundred thousand bucks, and not before. He'd show them, the whole stinking, bloody lot of them, how smart they were.

He had already started the engine and engaged the clutch, before it occurred to him to think of the child as a living creature who might need attention. Suddenly as concerned for her well-being as he had recently been careless of it, he jumped out of the car, and, turning on his flashlight, opened the back door and hastily unlocked the black bag. His relief when he found that she was still breathing, and therefore still negotiable, was intense.

She had freed her arms from her blankets, but she had not regained normal consciousness. That she had been much too hot in the close confines of the bag was evidenced by her flushed cheeks and the dampness of her fair curls, but apart from this he saw nothing in her appearance to cause him any alarm.

Kids are tougher than they look, he thought callously, and closed and locked the black bag again. Then, climbing back into the car, he settled himself as comfortably as he could for the all-night drive ahead of him.

He was able to take his bearings from the first small town through which he passed, and not long after that was on the main highway to the north.

He encountered very little traffic, and for two hours made good time without admitting to himself that eventually he would be forced to make a stop in order to buy gasoline. It was nearly midnight, and the needle of the gauge was hovering close to the empty mark before he would face the necessity. Then, as irrational in this as in everything else, he became terrified lest the tank run dry before reaching a service station. When he next saw the glimmer of lights ahead of him this fear had become, for the moment, so much greater than any other, that he drove up to the pumps they had signalled without the slightest hesitation.

It was a girl who came out to serve him; a stocky, dark-haired girl wearing a blue smock with ‘Pete's Place' emblazoned on one sleeve.

“Fill her up,” he said briefly.

“You want the oil checked?”

“No.”

Beyond the pumps he could see a brilliantly lit lunch counter with windows open to the warm night, and he realized that he wanted a cup of coffee as much as he had ever wanted anything in his life. Running his tongue over dry lips, he wondered if he dared go in. The place was empty; he could sit at the counter and watch the car at the same time; and the fact that a girl was looking after the pumps seemed proof that she and another smocked figure he could see inside were the only people around.

“That'll be four sixty-five.”

He watched her narrowly while she counted out change for the five-dollar bill he handed her. She did not appear to take the slightest interest in him.

He waited until she had gone back inside before making up his
mind. Then, getting out of the car, and locking it, he followed her up a shallow flight of steps and through a screen door which he failed to shut properly.

It was not until a cup of coffee had been set down in front of him that he noticed the radio, which he realized had been on ever since, and probably before, he came into the place. The sweat breaking out on his forehead, he heard the opening sentences of a midnight newscast.

Swinging around, he addressed the two waitresses who were idly talking to one another at the further end of the counter. “Turn that thing off, will you. It gets on my nerves.”

The dark girl replied. “The boss don't like——”

“Turn the bloody thing off!”

The girl shrugged, did as he asked, and, deliberately turning her back on him, resumed her conversation.

Radios, telephones, police—soon, if not already, they would all be his mortal enemies. He took a scalding mouthful of coffee, and spat it back into the cup. The radio silenced, the girls' voices were perfectly audible to him. He was tempted to tell them to shut up. They made it difficult for him to listen for approaching cars, and he was not going to risk staying if another car drew up outside.

“—don't think he could have really meant it.”

“Oh, he meant it right enough. It's just the way he is.”

“Well, if you ask me—say, did you hear that?”

“What?”

“Listen! I could've sworn I heard a kid crying.”

The man's stool crashed backwards to the floor, and coffee poured across the marble counter from an overturned cup, as he leaped for the door.

Fumbling frantically with his car keys, he could hear that the child was not only crying, but also beating small fists in wild desperation against the walls of her black prison.

His foot pressing the accelerator to the floor boards, he swung the car violently away from the pumps and sent it hurtling into the darkness ahead. Again he had escaped; but there was no escaping from the sobbing of the child whom he took with him.

“Shut up—shut up—shut up!” he muttered savagely. “Do you hear me, you bloody little bastard—shut up!”

The clock at the foot
of
the circular stairway struck three in a house normally, at that hour, quiet and dark, tonight blazing with lights
.

Sharon heard it, and thought: “She has been gone eight hours now.” First it was one hour, then two, then three—now the black gulf stretching between her and her baby was eight hours wide. How much wider was it going to get? “Oh, God—God, in Your mercy, bring her back to us! Christ—help me to bear the unbearable!”

Dwight, standing behind Sharon's chair, bleak grey eyes fixed on the ashes
of
a
fire
that had died unattended nearly eight hours earlier, heard the clock, and thought: “She can't go on much longer like this. God, show me how best I can help her.”

The police inspector, sitting across the room
from
them, heard it, knew he should have been in bed long ago, and wondered what it was about these people that had brought him back to this house for the third time that night, when he could have delegated this last visit to a junior officer
.

He ran his finger down the side
of
his long, deeply creased face, while he wished he had more and better news to give them
.

Clearing his throat, the sound loud in a house too quiet since the tread
of
many feet had ceased soon after midnight, he told them that the kidnapper had been identified one hundred and forty miles north of the city. Speaking quickly and concisely, he gave them an account
of
the long-distance call received from a dark-haired waitress who had seen more than she had appeared to see, and whose photographic memory had produced a description even more exact than that on the nation-wide broadcast which she had picked up at two o'clock
.

Dwight's voice was steady. “Someone will see this girl personally?”

“A special detective is already on his way.”

“You're setting up road blocks?”

The inspector nodded. “By seven o'clock this morning every car moving on a main road within four hundred miles of that lunch counter will be stopped and searched.”

“It can't be done any faster?”

The inspector did not resent the question. He had asked it himself, and with more heat, at headquarters. “It's a big country, sir, and when you look at it where we're looking, a very empty one. We're moving men in as fast as we can.”

Sharon saw an army of blue-coated men marching down into a gulf now nearly nine hours wide, and knew that she must go with them, down, down into the darkness——. With a whisper as meaningless as the soft whisper of her silk dress, she crumpled forward on to the
floor.

The child's frenzied, piteous crying was a steady assault on the man's nerves for more than an hour and a half. Cursing himself for the crazy impulse which had moved him to throw away chloroform he would willingly have employed any number of times, he raved and shouted at her in a hoarse voice which occasionally rose to a scream. His black eyes, fixed on the narrow band of light always just in front of the car, were scarcely sane, and, at about the time when she finally became silent, he was very close to quieting her for good with a spanner that lay on the floor beside his feet. The ransom was all that had prevented him from doing so earlier. Money was his only remaining reality in a nightmare in which life and death had become equally inconsequential, in which there had never been a day, never anything but darkness and fear and an empty road that curved and twisted and straightened, only to curve and twist and straighten again.

At first he had been relieved when he noticed how infrequent the towns were becoming, and how insignificant, no sooner approached than lost in the chasms of the night behind him. And trees, interspersed less and less often by clearings, had seemed to provide cover for a flight which would evade all pursuit. But now.
the quiet black palisades of forest, pressing in on him from both sides, unbroken for miles by any sign of human habitation, became a menace in themselves. Born and bred in the noisy, never-sleeping heart of a great city, this vast silence appeared as inimical to him as the dark, unexplored silence of outer space.

If he had been told then that a full-scale man-hunt had already been launched against him, that the hunters were at that moment setting up their traps ahead of him, and that only by a miracle had he escaped those even now in place behind him, he would not have believed it.

Mesmerized by the steady hum of the car engine, so unvarying a rhythm it scarcely qualified as sound any more, his brain fogged by lack of sleep, he was unaware that his speed was decreasing, and that his driving was becoming more and more erratic, the old car wandering from one side of the road to the other like a drunk unlikely to reach home safely.

As the stars began to fade, and darkness was diluted by a thin promise of dawn, the trees fell back to give way to what at first appeared to be rolling pastureland; pastureland that grew, with sudden, appalling lack of forewarning, into squat, unnaturally smooth mountains rearing up in stark silhouette against the dying night.

The mines, the man thought dully.

The hydro pole into which he crashed two miles further on seemed to come to meet the car, rather than the car going toward it. He was aware of a sickening jar and a sharp agony in his left side, while his ears rang with the harsh discord of splintering wood, tortured metal, and shattered glass.

The rippling echoes of a disturbance too slight to affect the grim slag hills that had borne witness to it, had long since dissipated before he was able, or even dared, to move.

Dragging himself out of this trap of his own devising, a wounded animal concerned now with nothing beyond its own immediate safety, he took stock of a situation which, bad though it was, could have been considerably worse. Once on his feet, he found that he had sustained, apart from cracked ribs, nothing more than minor bruises. His hand pressed to his side to ease the
pain there, his pallid mouth funneling a steady stream of obscenities, he examined the car.

In a grey light, belonging neither to night nor to day, he saw that it had fared, if anything, better than he had himself. One headlight was smashed, the grill was buckled, and the front bumper, embedded in the shredded side of the wooden pole, had been torn loose, but there was no really serious damage visible. If the wheel alignment was still true, it could be driven with safety.

Hope flaring up in him again, he struggled into his seat, started the motor, and, in reverse gear, roared the engine. The chassis vibrated noisily, and the wheels spun, but the car did not move. Flinging open the door, he got out to discover what was the matter.

On first sight of the front wheel overhanging the edge of the ditch, he thought it would be comparatively easy to push the car free of both ditch and pole. Five minutes later, blind with sweat, his side a torment he wished he could tear out with his bare hands, he knew he was beaten: even uninjured he could not have done it. Wildly he looked up at the lightening sky, desperately searched with bloodshot eyes a landscape devoid of life or movement of any kind, a world in which nothing grew and no birds sang. Shivering with cold and fear, his breath coming in short laboured gasps, he knew he must run, and made an enormous effort to pull himself together sufficiently to think of what must be done before he started running.