The Dark Descends (9 page)

"Give, Joyce," Del said. "Give."

And now a chant began. "Give, Joyce. Give, give, give, give, GIVE, GIVE, GIVE, GIVE, GIVE, GIVE, GIVE, GIVE, GIVE, GIVE—"

Joyce clapped her hands over her ears. "All right. All right. You can have it if you want it. My parents died when I was six. Both of them. In an automobile crash. I went to live with my aunt, and she wouldn't let me have my dolls anymore. Oh, I wasn't Cinderella or Little Orphan Annie or anything like that. Aunt Blanche just didn't believe in pampering children. My cousins never played with dolls, so I couldn't either. Aunt Blanche was fair. So very, very fair. She saw to it that I got the same education my cousins got, even though the insurance my parents left didn't quite cover it. That's how fair she was. And you know what? When she died, there were happy faces at the funeral. My uncle. My four cousins. They looked happy. Happy, happy, happy. But I'll bet none of them was as happy as—"

Joyce broke off, aghast. The faces that confronted her were no longer ferocious, no longer inhuman. Some looked surprised, some shocked. Gentle Rebecca looked horrified. Well, why shouldn't she look horrified? They all should have been looking—

Joyce burst into tears. Covering her face with her hands, she sobbed and sobbed, uncontrollably, interminably. Her throat grew sore; she felt as though there could be no drop of liquid left in her system. And still the tears came. And refused to stop coming. Dimly she was aware of murmuring, movement, general exodus. An arm slid round her gently, and a glass was forced into her hand. Kitty's soft voice, close to her ear, urged her to drink. She drank. It was grapefruit juice. Unsweetened grapefruit juice. It tasted good. Delicious, in fact. Now she was on a toboggan coasting down a hill, gathering speed as she went down, down, down, down...

She came up to find herself alone in Kitty's living room, stretched out on the divan with a fleecy woolen blanket covering her. One small lamp was alight, no doubt to guard against the panic of an awakening in unfamiliar surroundings. Considerate. Joyce felt a twinge, remembering why consideration was necessary. Only a slight twinge. It didn't seem very important. Nothing seemed very important, somehow. Probably she should be thinking about getting up, writing a note of apology for the trouble she'd caused, and taking herself off, but she felt too comfortable to move....

By and by a man came into the room. Jake, presumably. He wore orchid pajamas of real silk, yet nonetheless managed to create an impression of indigence, perhaps because he was so thin. Bald on top, he wore what remained of his dark hair long, and his beard was thick and luxuriant.

The smile he gave Joyce was broad enough to show how badly stained with nicotine his teeth were.

"Hi. Glad to see you've snapped out of it. Kitty was worried. She said you conked out the minute she gave you that tranquilizer."

"Was that what she gave me? It hit me like a bomb. I haven't been sleeping too well lately. I guess that's why."

"She had no business giving it to you. Those things aren't exactly peppermint candy. Maybe we'd better have a doctor, just to be on the safe side."

"Good lord, no. I'm fine now. Really. As a matter of fact, I was thinking about getting up and going home when you came in."

"At this hour? Listen, kiddo, I'm all for the movement and the anything-a-man-can-do-you-can-do-better jazz, but what's the sense of going out into the night to face a junkie's switchblade? I mean, what are you trying to prove? Go back to sleep. I'll take you home in the morning."

Giving her the sort of finger-fluttering wave he might have given to a child, he went out.

Joyce snuggled under the blanket and immediately dropped off to sleep. When she woke again, dawn was filtering through the Venetian blinds. No one else in the apartment was stirring yet. Hurriedly she got up, tidied the divan, tidied herself as best she could, and scribbled a note to Kitty. Out in the street, she was assailed by a sense of omission, of something not attended to, but she couldn't put her finger on what it was.

Later in the day, when she was busy with an article on the pros and cons of legalizing marijuana (an objective article, but
Yardstick
's position, staunchly con, came through loud and clear), it hit her: she had failed to find out where the poster showing the peaceful hut came from. A trivial thing, surely, and yet the disappointment that swept over her was acute.

...

"Get some gigolo type to make a big play for her. Her trouble being what it is, she's bound to fall for him like a shot, and the minute he has her on the hook, he tells her off and bolts."

"Buy a rabbit and have the butcher lop off the ears and cut it up without skinning it. Then wrap it up and leave it outside her door. She'll think it's a dead cat, and you know how old maids are about cats."

"Flush your toilet. The minute the tank fills up, flush it again. Keep flushing it over and over and over. If it's the kind of building where you can hear the radio in another apartment, it's probably the kind of building where the plumbing sounds a real serenade, and she'll hear it no matter how much noise she's making. I once lived in one of those ultra-modem palaces that took up a whole city block, and there wasn't a minute of the night or day that somebody somewhere in the palace wasn't flushing the toilet. It was enough to drive anybody nuts, and this dame wouldn't have far to go, from the sound of things."

"Call her up in the middle of the night. When she answers, don't say anything, just breathe heavily into the mouthpiece. You wouldn't believe what that sounds like at the other end of the wire. Keep it up all night long. If she stops answering the phone, keep on ringing anyway. Having the telephone ring constantly and being afraid to answer it can be a pretty nerve-wracking scene."

"Go up on the roof of your building and give her a taste of her own medicine. I know a guy who had a problem like yours, and he used to take a basketball up on the roof and practice his dribble every night. Killed two birds with one stone—his neighbor begged for mercy and he made the varsity at college. Probably dribbling on the roof in the middle of the night wouldn't be your thing, but you might be able to get hold of some kind of gadget that would keep the ball moving up there. You know, like that Iron Mike pitching machine they use in baseball. I bet any high school kid with a mechanical bent could rig up something for you."

"Filter gas into her apartment. Easiest thing in the world. You take a rubber tube, attach one end to your stove and put the other against her keyhole or the space under the door-any place where you can whisk it away at a minute's notice. Then when she calls the gas company because she's sure there's a leak, they come and don't find a thing. Then you start with the gas again, and they come and don't find a thing again, and you get a nice little round going. Stands to reason they'll think she's a fruitcake, and she'll see they think she's a fruitcake and get sore. But at the same time she'll be worrying about that leak, see? You know how smelling gas affects people, especially women. Pretty soon she won't know if she's coming or going. Somebody I know tried the gas bit on a real crabby neighbor of his and it worked like a charm. She moved to a place that's all electric."

"Write poison-pen letters. Not the kind you send to her friends and cronies about her. That stuff might go down in a ye olde Agatha Christie type village, but in New York who takes any notice of gossip about anybody they know, even if you spread the word that she's screwing everybody from the milkman to the bartender in the White Horse Tavern? The kind of letter to write is the kind you send directly to her, letting her know the scoop you'll be shouting from the rooftops next, as if anybody gave a damn. Except her. She'll care, of course. People always do—an ego thing. Believe me, a campaign like that can be pretty soul-shattering. Somebody launched one against a friend of mine a few years back, when her husband was doing his army stint overseas. She was bombarded with smut about her activities—all fabrication and damned if she didn't start believing she was no good herself. It almost broke up the marriage."

And so on. The thing that amazed Joyce, in the course of taking a small-scale opinion poll, was the amount of diabolical ingenuity people were able to summon up for plotting in a vacuum. It was almost as though her request for ideas on how to deal with her difficulties were an open sesame to the stores of venom hidden beneath civilized exteriors. Wish fulfillment? Certainly it was hard to believe that the majority of schemes related to her had ever been put into practice, despite the assurances that "a friend of mine" or "some guy I know" had tried this one or that one: all were so blatant that the victims would scarcely have been likely to take their medicine lying down.

Still, it could be argued that the schemes were last-ditch measures, leveled against people who were already doing their worst, so the fear of retaliation wouldn't necessarily be a deterrent. Nor would it be in her own case. What retaliatory measures could Charlotte Bancroft take that were more punitive than that radio, after all? No doubt a few were imaginable, but Joyce didn't care to do any imagining. She was looking for a way to get her own back, by fair means or foul, simply because doing something—anything—was better than bottling up her resentment any longer. A line of reasoning, admittedly, that came pretty close to do-it-yourself psychoanalysis, but what the hell, the alternative seemed to be a let-Charlotte-do-it boot into the booby hatch.

In the end, Joyce thought of the idea herself. It came out of the blue late one night, when she was soaking in the bathtub. It was, like most brainstorms, the kind of scheme that judicious reflection would expose loopholes in. One loophole was obvious immediately—the scheme was criminally actionable. But in order to act, the police would have to trace the perpetrator, and if the perpetrator took proper precautions...

Almost without volition, Joyce found her mind working out details, concocting security measures. The dangerous aspects of the scheme were those that involved the assistance of outside forces. First, a printer, but using one in some remote region—the East Bronx, say, or Hoboken—would probably be safe enough. Second, a means of distributing what came from the printer, but here Anita could undoubtedly be of help, always supposing she was willing.

Anita was willing. In fact, downright eager. "It's absolutely the end. You have the instincts of a master criminal, Joyce. Don't give the distribution a thought. My friend has a regular band of merry men, and he can round up anything in the Village that walks or crawls and press it into service. The only thing that worries me is the printer. Chances are she will call in the pigs, and it would be child's play for them to track down any printer, even if you went to the moon to find one. A job like this would be one any printer would remember, no two ways about it, so that means he would probably remember you, too. No, I don't like it. Too risky."

"Well, you've let the air out of the balloon. The thing's impossible without a printer."

"You say uncle too easily. Buy some index cards and a rubber-stamp kit with movable letters and numbers and print the literature yourself. Like I told you, Joyce, you have to be flexible."

And so the decision was made. For the supplies, Joyce went to a midtown branch of a large firm of stationers during lunch hour, inevitably the most crowded time of day. Excessive caution, probably, since no sales clerk would have been likely to recall the purchase of items so innocuous as a stamp kit and fifty packets of a hundred three-by-five index cards. But if she was going to play the game she was going to play it right, however much she might feel like someone deliberately setting out to be a hit-and-run driver.

The feeling intensified that evening, when she opened the gate-leg table and set out her equipment—the cards, the stamp kit, a pair of tweezers, a pair of white cotton gloves. Yet as soon as she began the actual stamping, every trace of squeamishness was gone; in a flash, she was completely caught up in the rhythm of her task. Much later, when the last card was stamped and the stamp had fallen from fingers by then nerveless, her senses awakened. Overhead, a rock group was on the job. Underfoot, the vibrations were setting the legs of her chair in motion. For the first time during the siege, she had been really and truly oblivious of Charlotte Bancroft's radio. Hallelujah.

Joyce yawned, stretched her arms high in the air. As she brought them down, her eyes fell on the message stamped on the cards.

...

CHARLOTTE'S BACK IN TOWN

898-4392

...

No, not hallelujah. Eureka was more like it.

At every party there comes a moment, sometime during the consumption of the second or the third martini, when one feels nicely set up, when all the harsh angles in one's surroundings begin to soften and every face coming into view is a good face. Joyce reached this step en route to nirvana with the first sip of her third martini, and not a moment too soon, either. Cold sober, she couldn't help feeling like odd woman out among this crowd of young and not-quite-so-young married couples, all in some way connected with the world of commercial art (who would ever imagine, from the other side of the urban boundary line, that Manhattan cocktail parties could seem as much of a closed circuit as any in suburbia?), but now, at last, Sheila's familiar living room had recovered all its charm, and the people in it were beginning to look glamorous. A few more sips, and they might be expected to scintillate.

Here came Sheila, a near-perfect Valkyrie in her floor-length, side-slitted gun-metal lamé column of a dress (only helmet and spear were lacking); she had in tow a stocky young man whose head barely cleared her shoulder. "I have a fresh ear for you to bend, Joyce. This is Steve Dorfmann. Tell him all about the metamorphosis. He's dying to hear it."

And Sheila was off again, leaving the young man in her wake like a bit of flotsam.

Unfair? Probably. But he certainly didn't look very prepossessing, with that babyish moon face and that thinning no-color hair, though the length of the hair and the gold-rimmed granny glasses seemed to indicate that he was trying, however vainly, to be with it. Or was it simply high seriousness he was striving for? The way he was corrugating his forehead suggested that he was about to deliver something really profound.