Dark on the Other Side (17 page)

The foul evening darkened, the rain beat a peremptory
tattoo against the window. Michael wandered the apartment like a caged
lion, unable to settle down or even to understand the strange sense of
uneasiness that grew, slowly but steadily. Unable to concentrate and
unwilling to go out, he puttered with small jobs he had been putting
off; he put a new light bulb in the kitchen and started to cook himself
something to eat. It was then that he discovered he had given Napoleon
the hamburger. There was nothing else fit to eat except various things
in cans, and he realized he wasn’t hungry anyhow. He was too nervous to
eat.

Nervous. Slowly Michael let himself down into a chair and
considered the word. He reviewed the symptoms: taut muscles, mildly
queasy stomach, restlessness, general malaise of mind. Yes, that was
his trouble; he was as nervous as a cat…. He gave the somnolent
Napoleon a look of hate, and revised the figure of speech. He hadn’t
had the symptoms for years, that was why he had been so slow to
recognize them—not since college exams, or the early days of his
working career, when a particular interview, or letter, or telephone
call might make or break his new-hatched confidence in himself. So why
now, when there was nothing hanging over him that really mattered?

The thing hit him with the violence of an earthquake, but
it was nothing physical, nothing that any of the conventional senses
would have recognized. Yet it was as peremptory as the sudden shrilling
of a telephone in a silent room. It summoned, like a shout; it tugged
at the mind like a grasping hand. It lasted for only a second or two,
in measurable time; but while it lasted, the room faded out and gray
fog closed in around him. He was conscious of nothing except the
calling. Even the hard seat of the chair under him and the solidity of
the floor beneath his feet seemed to dissolve. It stopped as abruptly
as it had begun. There was no fading out, merely a cessation.

Michael found himself on his feet. His face was wet with
perspiration, and his knees were weak. Blinking like a man who has
emerged from a cave into bright sunshine, he looked around the familiar
kitchen, and found its very normalcy an affront. The table was still a
table; it rocked slightly under the pressure of his hand as it always
did. It ought to have changed into an elephant or a tortoise. The view
from the kitchen window should not be the normal view of night
darkness; it ought to show an alien sun over some weird landscape. The
thing that had invaded his mind was as shattering and as inexplicable
as any such transformation.

But the most incredible thing about the experience was
that he accepted it. He knew, not only what the calling was, but who
had sent it. Knew? The verb was too weak; there was no word in the
language for the absolute, suprarational conviction that filled his
mind.

He was still a little unsteady on his feet as he crossed
the room. He noticed that Napoleon was no longer in his favorite place
by the door. Evidently the cat had left, and he hadn’t even heard him
go.

His desk was covered with papers, notes, books. Michael
didn’t touch any of them. Slumped in his chair, his eyes fixed on
vacancy, he thought. It was one of the hardest jobs he had ever done in
his life; methodically, he examined and demolished all the guideposts
he had established in the past ten days—as well as a few mental
monuments that had been standing a lot longer. It left his conscious
mind pretty bare. He didn’t try to construct any new theories to fill
it up. He couldn’t yet.

The urgent impulse that still gripped him, even though
its stimulus had vanished, did not interfere with his thinking; it
occupied a level much more basic than reason or conscious thought. It
was rather like an overpowering hunger or thirst. But he couldn’t yield
to it yet; a man who walks along a contaminated stream knows, even
though his throat is a dusty agony, that he cannot relieve the pain
until he finds clear water.

Why hadn’t he gone out, that afternoon, to get the
envelope Galen wanted him to have? The office was closed now, and he
didn’t know the secretary’s last name, or address.

The contents of that envelope must concern Randolph, and
they must be important. That conclusion wasn’t intuitive; it was the
result of logic. Galen’s reaction that night, when he learned the
identity of the fugitive, had been markedly peculiar. He hadn’t been
merely surprised; he had been worried. That last, hasty spate of advice
had also been uncharacteristic:
Don’t do anything, don’t take
any action whatsoever. I’ll discuss it with you when I get back
.

But Galen had decided the matter couldn’t wait. That
oblique reference at the beginning of the telephone conversation
indicated that he had been thinking about the Randolphs, and strongly
suggested that the rest of the conversation concerned them. Galen
thought nothing of trans-Atlantic telephone calls, or any other
obstacle that stood in the way of what he wanted done, but he did not
extend himself over a mere whim. The material must be important. And if
it were favorable, noncontroversial, Galen wouldn’t be so cautious
about it.

Unless one of the Randolphs had been Galen’s patient.
Michael dismissed that theory at once. Under no circumstances would
Galen discuss a patient’s case with him. No, the connection had to be
something else; and Michael had a pretty good idea as to what it must
be.

He tried to remember his first impressions of Galen, but
he couldn’t pin them down; Galen had just been one of the Old Man’s
friends, too antique to be interesting. Galen must be over sixty—he had
to be, if he and the Old Man had been at school together in Europe,
before the last big war. He didn’t look it. Physical fitness was
something of a fetish with him. Not surprising, perhaps, after the
two-year hell of a concentration camp and the desperate years of
underground fighting that had preceded the camp. More surprising was
Galen’s mental stability. There was a certain ruthlessness under that
passionless exterior of his, but he was as free of bitterness as he was
free of optimism. It was revealing, perhaps, that he never spoke of the
war years, or of the wife and small son who had been devoured by the
holocaust. His reference to his boyhood pet was one of the few times
Michael had ever heard him mention his childhood. His parents, too…

It was Michael’s father who had been primarily
responsible for getting Galen out of the chaos of postwar Germany; the
kind of help the old man had given during those years had never been
made explicit to Michael, by either man; but after his father’s death,
Galen was—there. Silent, withdrawn, unsentimental—but there.

Michael shook himself mentally. This was a sidetrack, a
waste of time. There was no point in speculating when, in a few hours,
he would have the answer in his hands. In the meantime…

He thought for another hour. At the end of that time he
finally moved, but not much; when he finished, there was on the table a
single sheet of paper. It contained only four names, in Michael’s
cramped writing, but he contemplated the meager results of his labors
with grim satisfaction.

Then he picked up the pen and added a phrase after three
of the names.

William Wilson. Dead. Suicide?

Tommy Scarinski. Nervous breakdown; attempted
suicide.

Joseph Schwartz. Breakdown; drugs.

He paused, pen poised, studying the list. Incredulity was
hard to conquer. It seemed so unlikely…. Yet there they were, four of
the people who had been closest to Gordon Randolph in his adult life.
His campaign manager and friend, and his three prize students during
that single year as a teacher—a position, surely, that gives a man or
woman enormous influence over younger minds. And of those three, one
was still a nervous wreck, and another had retreated from a promising
career into a world of drug-induced terrors. And the third…

The third was Randolph’s wife.

III

Threading a tempestuous path through a mammoth traffic
jam, Michael blasphemed the beautiful weather and the long weekend. The
balmy sunshine had infected half the inhabitants of the city with the
urge to flee to Nature. Galen’s secretary was one of them. It was after
ten that morning when the answering service told him the office
wouldn’t be open, and he had wasted more time in a futile attempt to
track down Galen’s secretary. Finally he drove to Galen’s house and
harassed his manservant until the poor devil consented to open up the
office and help him search. That had taken several more hours—the
harassment, not the search. Whatever her other failings, Galen’s
secretary did what she was told. The envelope, with Michael’s name
typed neatly on it, was in the top drawer of her desk.

Badly as he wanted to examine the contents, another need
was stronger. He had wakened that morning with a renewed uneasiness,
not so demolishing as the call that had summoned him the night before,
but constant and peremptory. He was on his way now to answer it.

He braked, swearing, as a blue Volkswagen roared blithely
past on the left and ducked into the nice legal margin between
Michael’s car and the rear of the one ahead of him. He couldn’t even
think in this chaos; driving took too much concentration, with so many
morons on the road.

He resisted the childish desire to drive right up onto
the back fender of the Volkswagen. Today, of all days, he couldn’t take
any chances. The afternoon was far gone; but he would reach his
destination in two or three hours, and by that time he had to have a
clearer idea of what he meant to do when he got there. So far the
demand had been strong and basic, blotting out all thoughts but one:
Get there. Sooner or later, though, he would have to make a plan. He
couldn’t stand on Andrea’s doorstep waiting for another message from
Beyond.

Linda must be at Andrea’s. It was the only place she
knew, the only potential ally who had not failed her. Michael had
reached that conclusion logically; direction was one of the elements
the mental call had lacked. Gordon had already searched the witch’s
cottage, which did not lessen the probability of Linda’s being there
now; the safest hiding place is one that has already been investigated.
But she would be wary of visitors in general and hostile toward Michael
in particular. Remembering the telephone book, open to the page with
Galen’s name, Michael felt the same mixture of shame and chagrin that
had moved him originally. He wasn’t proud of his performance that
night. To say the least, it had been stupid. She probably thought of it
as betrayal. No, she wouldn’t let him into the house, not unless the
days of loneliness and fear had reduced her courage to the breaking
point. He might have to break into the house—a prospect he faced with
surprising equanimity. For such a purpose, darkness would be useful.

But when he stopped at a restaurant in the next town, it
was not only because of the need to kill a little more time. He
couldn’t wait any longer to see what was in Galen’s envelope.

It was a big Manila envelope and it was sealed not only
by tape but by a heavy wad of sealing wax. The wax was fresh and the
envelope clean, which meant that the material it contained must have
been gathered together only recently. It was not one of those envelopes
so dear to writers of sensational fiction, which has been moldering for
years in a secret hiding place until the
deus ex machina
of the book produces it just in time to foil the villain. The envelope
was not bulky. It could not contain more than a dozen sheets of paper.

When he had the papers in his hand, Michael sat staring
blindly at them for a while before he started to read. He had been
expecting what he found; it was, after all, the most logical connecting
link between Galen and Randolph. But it was still something of a shock
to see again the sprawling, angular handwriting that had once been as
familiar as his own.

A letter a week for almost seven years, arriving every
Tuesday morning. Careless and unmethodical as his father was about
other things, he wrote every Sunday. Michael never kept personal
letters after he answered them; there certainly had been no particular
point in saving his father’s. They were good letters, informative and
amusing because of their acidulous comments on people, books, and
events. So far as he could remember, the old man had never mentioned
Randolph. Which was not surprising; by the time he had left home,
Randolph was no longer a student.

His father had written less frequently to Galen, but he
had kept up a regular correspondence with his old friend. Galen never
threw anything away. These letters were only a small part of the mass
of materials that were docketed, labeled, and filed—both in the neat
cabinets filling several rooms of Galen’s house, and in the latter’s
capacious memory. Galen had not kept these letters because of a
premonition. But he would not have produced them now unless they had
significance.

After these optimistic deductions, the first letter was a
disappointment. It didn’t even mention Randolph’s name.

Professor Collins rambled on for two pages about the
petty gossip and activities of the university. Michael knew that some
of the ivory towers were rat infested, but he had forgotten how largely
small malices can loom, even to a mind that is supposed to wander in
the airy realms of ideas. Cheating on examinations, unexpected
pregnancies, a rumor of students dabbling in black magic…Nothing was
new on the campuses. There was only one name mentioned in the letter,
that of a student for whom his father had high hopes. His name was not
Randolph.

Puzzled and deflated, Michael put the letter aside. Maybe
Galen’s secretary had made a mistake, or else Galen had told her to
include all the letters dated to a particular year. He could hardly
quote specific identifying details over the telephone, especially when
he hadn’t read the letters for over ten years.