NORDLUND
stared at him, his mouth open. “You’re out of your mind, Professor.”
Tanner’s bowels had turned to water and he was afraid he was going to lose everything while he stood there. “Not yet,” he chattered, “but I soon will be, won’t I?”
Marge was very close to him, trying to put her arms around him. “Bill, you’re sick. Come with us and we’ll …”
He got the pistol out of his pocket and held it in a trembling hand. “Stay away, Marge. I know you’re a puppet but I don’t want to kill you. Stay away from me.
Please!”
She hesitated and unwillingly let him go. Nordlund said, “I don’t blame you for being frightened, Professor. You’ve been through a lot. It’s only natural that you should be close to cracking. But you’ve got to get a grip on yourself, man—you’ve got to pull yourself together!”
It sounded so plausible, so logical. He was worn out and tired and Nordlund only wanted to help. It would be so easy to lie to himself … .
Nordlund held the car door open. “Come on, get in and I’ll drive you to a motel.”
“Some drive.” Tanner’s voice was still shaking. “You and Marge and me, all alone. How many pieces would I get to the motel in? By the time you got through with me, I could be stuck in a letter and mailed there.”
“I’m losing my temper,” Nordlund said, his lips tight. “I almost lost my life, too, remember? And if it hadn’t been for you, I would have died.”
Tanner bobbed his head quickly. “Yeah, good act. One of the best I’ve ever seen. I believed it. But it was just an act. It would have been much more convincing if I had gone up earlier, though, wouldn’t’ve it? But you had to string it out too long, you had to pretend that you had fought off Hart for half an hour. It can’t be done. I know.
Nobody
can fight
you
off for that long—not the first time! And what would have happened if I had gone up alone?”
Nordlund shook his head pityingly. “You’ve really stripped your gears, Professor. You’ve really gone overboard.”
“I really have, haven’t I? But I think I stripped them long ago—I must have to have been so stupid. You were the most logical candidate all the time. The Navy man, slipping into survival research so you would know just how close anybody might be to tagging you, to guessing that there might be somebody like you. How many reports never got to Washington, how much information was misfiled? And what a spot for you! What an opportunity to meet important people and have easy access to classified files!”
The rain was cold and the wind was raw and he felt on fire with fever. He was going to come down with pneumonia, he thought—but that didn’t matter a bit.
“And nobody had a photograph of you, Commander. Your yeoman showed me a picture one day and I’ll bet he had a fatal heart attack that same afternoon, didn’t he? A fuzzy photograph—the Navy doesn’t have a clear one of you at all, does it? And nobody ever remembers to get one, do they?”
Nordlund tried to reason with him like he would with a small child. “Look, Professor, Adam Hart was just killed. You saw him back there, dead, just half an hour ago.”
The thought of DeFalco sobered Tanner. “Poor Eddy. You were planning to use him from the very start, weren’t you? And when it came time to stage your production number, you used him as bait. You pulled the strings and served him up on a silver platter. You made him pull the gun when he was about to leave at the exit, to make sure the police would kill him!” He paused, trying to control his voice. “I should have guessed—it was all so easy for me when Commander Nordlund started to help!”
“Do you think that everything DeFalco did was human?” Nordlund asked dryly. “Do you think a human being could have made it through the gunfire and leaped from beam to beam on the framework like he did?”
Tanner was half screaming now, the rain streaming down his face and running into his mouth and fuzzing his words. “Sure he could—with you pulling the strings! You! Sitting on the bench and pretending to be asleep! It took a lot of concentration to run him around, didn’t it? You sat there and worked the wires and watched your puppet dance! And I’ll bet it was goddamned difficult keeping him together for as long as you did, wasn’t it?”
Nordlund shook his head sadly. Marge was crying.
Tanner felt hoarse. “DeFalco couldn’t have been you, Adam! He died too easy and he died in a stupid way. You would have died hard and you would have been clever, you wouldn’t have made any grandstand plays!”
He took a breath. There was no stopping now, he was committed. “I should have guessed Nordlund was you when you pulled the act in your way. You were after the rest of us because we were investigating him, because it wouldn’t be long before we knew too much. Olson was killed because he could finger you, Van because he failed you, and Karl and Scott because they were too curious. And Eddy was your ace in the hole from the start, wasn’t he? But there was absolutely no reason to kill ‘Commander Nordlund.’ He wasn’t investigating, he wasn’t even interested!
“And the main reason why Eddy couldn’t have been you—the reason you overlooked because you didn’t know about it. DeFalco had an opportunity to kill me once, in the cemetery after Olson’s burial. There was nobody around, we were absolutely alone. It could have been done quickly and quietly and there were gravediggers behind the hill who could have hidden the evidence! If DeFalco had been you, he wouldn’t have overlooked that chance!”
He was crying with exhaustion now and his voice came out in huge sobs. “I wanted out a dozen times, I wanted to forget all about it! Why did you keep hounding me, Hart? Why?”
He didn’t wait for an answer but did what he had to do. He squeezed the trigger twice, before he could even think about it, then let his arm fall to his side and started backing away.
Both shots had missed. The man in front of him hadn’t moved, except to turn up his raincoat collar against the driving wetness.
And then the picture was complete.
The night and the rain and the scudding clouds and the two of them. The belted Navy raincoat with the turned-up collar and the soft hat, dripping rain, that kept the face in shadow. Commander Arthur Nordlund.
The Enemy.
Adam Hart.
Tanner turned and ran and was almost to the funhouse entrance when something caught him and spun him around so hard he slipped to his knees on the walk. The man a hundred feet away still hadn’t moved.
Olson.
Scott.
Grossman.
Van Zandt.
DeFalco.
you don’t think you’re going to get away, do you, animal?
The muscles in the soles of his feet suddenly knotted and cramped so hard it brought a shriek of pain to his lips. He didn’t want to get up, he knew what torture it would be to stand on them. He wanted to lie in the mud at the side of the walk and die there, to lie on his stomach and breathe the ditch water and hope he drowned before Hart tore up his insides like he had the dog’s.
He got to his feet.
He screamed with agony when he stood on them but he made it inside the grinning lips of the fun house door. Out of sight and the pressure was less and he started running down the tracks the little funhouse cars rode on. The cars themselves were outside, covered with canvas.
He glanced back once and saw a figure in the doorway and shot wildly at it, a fraction of a second before his arm developed cramps and his biceps felt like somebody had gripped them and was grinding in until sharp fingers touched the bone. He couldn’t see in the darkness and he banged into the curving walls and felt the blood spurt from his nose.
don’t run …
The whisper formed in his mind like a bubble of smoke. The gravel of the tracks seemed to grow to the size of rocks and he stumbled and fell and cut his knees. It was getting hard to breathe. The very air was viscous, like molasses. Funny. The laughter ripped from his throat. Like molasses.
don’t run …
He didn’t catch the faint flicking of the switch, the silent purr of the electrically operated machinery. He wasn’t ready for it when he stumbled around a corner and the Laughing Lady swayed out from the wall, luminous and red-faced, big, puffy balloon arms holding her stomach as she rocked back and forth roaring with recorded laughter.
“Don’t run! Ho-ho-ho-hah-hah-hah! Don’t run! Hah-hah-hah! DON’T RUN! HO-HO-HO! DON’T RUN!”
The sound roared down at him and the balloon arms brushed him, thick rubbery fingers trailing across his face and shoulders. He screamed and fired at it and little cogs and wheels came spurting out and the big balloon arms sagged limply and the voice died in a gurgle. He was rushing down the tracks now, screaming frantically as the artificial spiderwebs brushed him or the dancing skeletons leaped out, their bony fingers stabbing at him and their voices shrieking.
It was only a low rumble that warned him in time. The low, rumbling sound and the slight quivering of the track. He flattened himself against the wall and the sound roared down at him, then the cars were rattling past, a bare two inches’ clearance between himself and them.
Silent laughter bellowed through his mind like it must have bellowed through Van Zandt’s before he had died. The laughter of a crazed thing that liked to see the animals die, whose final act for his puppets was always suicide.
There was a ledge paralleling the track and he climbed up on it. A passageway opened off of it and he ran through. He abruptly tripped and fell flat, angular boards cutting into his chest and stomach. A passageway with the tilt boards, like miniature teetertotters, that kept turning one way or the other. He got up and picked his way down the passageway, rounded another corner, and came out in a small, closed room with a red glow coming from a wall niche.
Satan in red, flames leaping at his feet, wearing the face of Arthur Nordlund. Only slightly twisted, slightly inhuman, and vastly … beautiful.
There was a noise behind him and Tanner whirled. The passageway he had come through was closed tight and he was locked in the room. He battered frantically at the walls and then another whirring sound started. The floor fell away from him and a side wall opened up and he found himself sliding down a strip of canvas with rollers beneath it.
The canvas was the tongue of the grinning exit-entrance and a moment later he was out in the open and the rain was washing over him. Full circle and he had come back to face the Enemy a hundred feet away.
There were little pricklings in his arms and legs and the nerves went to sleep. His fingers lost their power to grip and the pistol slipped from his hand to fall on the asphalt. The pressure on his mind was rubbing away his sense impressions of the world like he had seen old ladies rub out the wrinkles in their foreheads. There was a relaxation of his muscular sphincters and a loss of feeling and connection with his own body. He tried to fight it, to will himself to feel and hear and respond. He didn’t succeed.
His legs gone and his arms numb and his pulse slowing and vague surprise that his breathing had stopped entirely. Then he was alone in the shadows of his mind, his consciousness dimming out like a spark that grows dimmer and dimmer until it’s a tiny light and then a twinkle and then nothing at all.
The fading impressions of the night.
The rain.
The damp cold.
Then no night, no rain, no feeling, no impressions at all. Just the tiny coal in the huge wilderness of his own brain.
He didn’t do it consciously and he did it without apparent effort. He reached out to Marge standing nearby. An overwhelming sense of empathy, a curious feeling of physical nearness, and a sudden brilliant pattern of tiny red threads that thinned out into nothingness. A feeling of resistance and an odd sensation of mixing …
The night and his impressions of it returned, but they were a different set of impressions this time. He had a different sense of being, and a vague cloud of emotions hampered his thinking. There was a different feeling to the air and the night and the rain. He realized he was seeing the world through different eyes—it was distorted and yet familiar.
He looked around and saw himself sinking to the shining black of the asphalt. A hundred feet away was the intense, glittering face of Adam Hart, the muscles in his face standing out rigid with the effort of his concentration.
It was like working a marionette. He pulled the strings and Marge responded.
She walked over and picked up the gun where he had dropped it. She turned and pointed it at Adam Hart. There was a flicker of awareness on Hart’s part, then, and a sudden change of pressure. For a moment Tanner was receiving two sets of sense impressions, seeing the world as if it were on stereoscopic slides and his eyes hadn’t quite meshed. Then Marge’s sense impressions began to fade and he knew that if he didn’t act now, Hart would be safe.
It took two shots to cut Adam Hart down.