The Sinful Ones (9 page)

He rounded the corner, noting a broken street lamp. He remembered the odd pattern of its cracks from last night.

He came to a high fence of iron and brick, to a tall gate of twisted grillework which he recognized.

He stopped dead, stared, took a backward step.

This couldn’t be it. He must have made a mistake.

But the spears of broken glass in the street lamp could not have been duplicated, nor, hardly, this elaborate gate.

The sunken sun, reaching a point from which its rays were reflected from the underside of a cloudbank, suddenly sent a spectral yellow afterglow. Everything was very clearly illuminated. Nothing was lost in shadow.

A gravel drive led up to just the sort of big stone mansion he had imagined—turreted, slate-roofed, heavy-eaved, in the style of the 1890’s.

But the gate and fence were rusty, tall weeds encroached on the drive, lawn and flowerbeds were a wilderness, the upper windows were blank and curtainless, most of them broken, those on the first floor were boarded up and the door as well. Pigeon droppings whitened the somber brown stone, and in the center of the lawn, half hidden by the weeds, stood a weather-bleached sign:

FOR SALE

CARR PUSHED DOUBTFULLY at the iron gate. It opened a couple feet, then squided to a stop against gravel still slightly damp from yesterday’s rain. He stepped inside.

The house seemed unquestionably deserted. Still, recluses have been known to live in unlikely places.

Or a place like this might be secretly used by intruders. Eyes might even now be peering through the cracks between the boards covering the lower windows.

His feet were carrying him up the driveway, which led back behind the house, passing under a porte-cochere. He had almost reached it when he noticed the footprints.

They were a woman’s, quite fresh, and yet sunk more deeply than his own. They must have been made since the rain. There were two sets, one leading toward the porte-cochere, the other back from it.

Looking at the black ruined flowerbeds, inhaling their dank odor, Carr was relieved that there were footprints.

He examined them more closely. Those leading toward the porte-cochere were deeper and more widely spaced. He remembered that Jane had been almost running.

But the most startling discovery was that the footprints never reached the house at all. They stopped a good six feet from the soil-streaked steps. They cluttered confusedly there, then they returned toward the gate. Evidently Jane had run under the porte-cochere, waited until she was sure he was gone, then retraced her steps.

She apparently had wanted him to think that she lived in a mansion.

He walked back to the gate. A submerged memory from last night was tugging at his mind. He looked along the iron fence fronting the sidewalk. A scrap of paper just inside caught his eyes. It was lodged in the low black shoots of some leafless shrub.

He remembered something white fluttering down from Jane’s handbag in the dark, drifting down.

He worked his way to it, pushing between the fence and the shrubbery. Unpruned shoots caught at his coat.

The paper was twice creased and the edges were yellow and frayed, as if it had been carried around for a long time. It was not rain-marked. Unfolding it, he found the inside filled with a brown-inked script vividly recalling Jane’s scribbled warning, yet much smaller and more crabbed, as if a pen were to her a chisel for carving hieroglyphs. With some difficulty, holding the paper up and moving toward the center of the tangled lawn to catch the failing light, he read:

Always keep up appearances.
Always be doing something.
Always be first or last.
Always be on the streets or alone.
Always have a route of escape.
Avoid: empty stores, crowded theaters, restaraunts, queues.
Safe places: libraries, museums, churches, bars.
Never hesitate, or you’re lost.
Never do anything odd—it wouldn’t be noticed.
Never move things—it makes gaps.
Never touch anyone—DANGER! MACHINERY!
Never run—they’re faster.
Never look at a stranger—it might be one of them.
These are the signs: contemptuousness, watchfulness, bluff; unveiled power, cruelty, lust; they use people; they are incubi, succubi. No one every really notices them—so don’t you.
Some animals are really alive.

Carr looked over his shoulder at the boarded-up house. A bird skimmed up from the roof. It looked leaner than a pigeon. Perhaps a nighthawk. Somewhere down the block footsteps were clicking on concrete.

He considered the shape of the paper. It was about that of an envelope and the edges were torn. At first glance the other side seemed blank. Then he saw a faded postmark and address. He struck a match and, shielding it with the paper, made out the name—Jane Gregg; and the city—Chicago. The postmark was a little more than a year old. The address, lying the crease, presented more difficult, but he deciphered it: 1924 Mayberry Street.

The footsteps had come closer. He looked up. Beyond the fence a couple were passing. He could see a bit of white wing-collar and the glitter of a sequined comb. The gait was elderly. He guiltily whipped out the match, but they walked by without turning their heads.

After a moment he slipped through the gate, pulled it shut, and set out in the same direction they were going, cutting across the street before he passed them.

The street lights winked on. The leaves near the lights looked an artificial green. He walked faster.

In this direction there was no abrupt zone-wall, but rather a gradual deterioration. The houses shouldered closer to each other, grew smaller, crept toward the street. The trees straggled, gave out, the grass died. Down the cross-streets neon signs began to glow, and the drone of busses, radios and voices grew in volume. Suddenly the houses coalesced, reached the sidewalk with a rush, shot up in towering brick combers, became the barracks of the middle classes, with only a narrow channel of sidewalk between their walls and the rows of cars parked bumper to bumper.

Carr thought wryly of his shattered theory of thick-carpeted halls, candlelight and a persecuted heiress. Mayberry Street wasn’t that.

The strange notes Jane had inked on the envelope kept flashing in his consciousness. If anything had ever read more like a paranoid’s rulebook—! And yet…

A bent yellow street-sign said
Maxwell.
At the next corner,
Marston.
Then, following the mindless association pattern that so often governs the selection of street names,
Mayberry.

He looked at the gold numerals painted on the glass door of the first apartment house. They were 1954-58.

As he went down the street, he had the feeling that he was walking back across the years.

The first floor of 1922-24 was lighted on the 24 side, except for a small dark sun-porch. Behind one window he noticed the edge of a red-upholstered davenport and a gray-haired man in shirtsleeves reading a newspaper. Inside the low-ceilinged vestibule he turned to the brass letter boxes on the 24 side. The first one read:
Herbert Gregg.
After a moment he pushed the button, waited, pushed it again.

There was no response, neither a mumble from the speaking tube, nor a buzz from the lock of the door to the stairs.

Yet the “Herbert Gregg” apartment ought to be the one in which he had seen the old man sitting.

Beyond the inner door, in the darkness of the stair well, he thought he saw something move. He couldn’t tell what it was. When he stepped closer and peered in, he saw nothing. He went outside. He craned his neck. The man was still sitting there. An old man—perhaps deaf?

Then, as Carr watched, the man put down his paper, settled back, looked across the room, and from the window came the opening triplets of the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata.

Carr felt the wire that fenced the tiny, nearly grassless plot press his calf and realized that he had taken a backward step. He reminded himself that he’d only heard Jane play the third movement. He couldn’t know she’d play the first just this way.

He went back into the vestibule, again pushed the button.

There was no faltering of the piano notes. They sounded icy, remove, inhuman, as if some huge insect were treading neatly, courtseyingly, infallibly up and down the keyboard.

Carr again peered through the inner door. Light trickled down from the second landing above. He tried the door. Someone must have left it off the buzzer, for it opened.

He hurried past the blackness of the bottom of the stair well. Five steps, a turn, five steps more. Then, just as he reached the first landing, which still wasn’t very light, he felt something small and silent come brushing up against his ankle from behind.

His back and hands pressed to the plaster wall.

Then he relaxed. Just a cat. A black cat with a white throat and chest, like evening clothes.

And a very cool cat too. It walked suavely toward the door of the Gregg apartment.

But about two feet away it stopped. For several seconds it stood there, head upraised, making no movement, except its fur seemed to thicken a little. Then, very slowly, it looked around.

It stared at Carr.

Beyond the door, the piano started the sprightly second movement.

Carr edged out his hand. His throat felt dry and constricted. “Kitty,” he croaked.

The cat arched its back, spat, then made a twisting leap that carried it halfway up the next semi-flight of stairs. It crouched on the top step, its bugged green eyes peering between the rails of the banister.

There were footsteps. Without thinking, Carr shrank back. The door opened, the music suddenly swelled, and a gray-haired lady in a blue and white print dress looked out and called, “Gigolo! Here, Gigolo!”

She had Jane’s small chin and short straight nose, behind veils of plumpness. Not Jane’s height, thought. She was rather dumpy. Her face had a foolish look.

And she must be short-sighted, for although she looked at the stairs, she didn’t see the cat, nor did she notice Carr. Feeling uncomfortably like a prowler, he started to step forward, then realized that she was so close he would give her a fright.

“Gigolo!” she called again. Then, to herself, “That cat!” A glance toward the dead bulb in the ceiling and a distracted headshake. “Gigolo!”

She backed inside. “I’m leaving it open, Gigolo,” she called. “Come in when you want to.”

Carr stepped out of the darkness with a husky, “Excuse me,” but the opening notes of the fast third movement, played too loudly, drowned him out.

He crossed to the door. The green eyes at the top of the stairs followed him. He raised his hand to knock. But at the same time he looked through the half-opened door, across a tiny hall, into the living room.

It was a smallish room, with too much heavy furniture in addition to the fake fireplace, and too many lace runners on little tables and antimacassars on the head rests and arms of chairs. He could see the other end of the red davenport and the slippered feet of the old man sitting in it. The woman had retired to a straight-backed chair across the room and was sitting with her hands folded, her lips worriedly pursed.

Between them was the piano, an upright. On top of it was a silver-framed picture of Jane.

But there was no one sitting at the piano.

To Carr, the rest of the room seemed to darken and curdle as he stared at the rippling keys.

Then he puffed out his breath. Of course, it was some kind of electric player.

He started to knock, then hesitated because they were listening to the music.

The woman moved uneasily on her chair. Her lips kept anxiously puckering and relaxing, like those of a fish behind aquarium glass.

Finally she said, “Aren’t you tiring yourself, dear? You’ve been at it all day, you know.”

Carr looked toward the man, but he could still see only the slippered feet. There was no reply.

The piano stopped. Carr took a step forward. But just then the woman got up and went over to the piano. He expected her to do something to the mechanism, but instead she began to stroke the air a couple of feet above the piano bench with a downward patting motion.

Carr felt himself shivering.

“There, there, dear,” she said, her face showing that silly, vacant expression he had noticed at the door, “that was very pretty, I know, but you’re really spending too much time on your music. At your age a girl ought to be having fun, meeting other young people. But you keep yourself cooped up.” She leaned forward, bent her head as if she were looking around the shoulder of someone seated at the piano, wagged her finger, and said with a sickly playfulness, “Look at the circles under those eyes.”

The slippered feet protruding from the red davenport twisted. A weary voice said, “Now don’t worry yourself over Jane, Mother.”

The woman straightened. “Too much practicing is bad for anyone. It’s undermining her health—and I don’t care how ambitious she is, or how ambitious you are for her.”

The slippered feet were drawn back. The davenport creaked. The man came into sight, not quite as old as Carr had thought, but tired-looking. His shirt, open at the neck, was made for a detachable collar.

For Carr, time stopped, as if a clockworks universe hesitated before the next tick. In that frozen pause, only his thoughts moved. It was true, then. The dumpy man…The room clerk…Marcia in her bedroom…Last night with Jane—the bar, the music shop, the movie house, the chessplayers…And now this old woman.

All, all automata, machines!

Or else (time moved again) this old woman was crazy.

Yes, that was it. Crazy, insane. Behaving in her insanity as if her absent daughter was actually there. Believing it.

He clung to that thought.

“Really dear,” the old woman was saying vapidly, “you simply must rest.”

“Now, mother, don’t get excited,” the old man said soothingly. “Everything’s all right.”

The father insane too, Carr thought. No, humoring her. Pretending to believe her hallucinations. That must be it.

“Everything isn’t all right,” she contradicted tearfully. “I won’t have Jane practicing so much and taking those wild long walks by herself. Jane, you mustn’t—” Suddenly a look of fear came over her. “Oh, Jane, don’t go. Please don’t go, Jane.” She stretched out her hand toward the hall as if to restrain someone. Carr shrank back. He felt sick. It was horrible that this mad old woman should resemble Jane.