Barbara Michaels - The Dark on the Other Side

Rain fell, heavily enough to keep the windshield wipers busy and make the oily surface of the highway dangerously slick. The weekend drivers were pouring back into the city. Michael had to pay close attention to his driving. A long night’s sleep had left him oddly unrefreshed; he had started out tired, and two hours on one of the nation’s most expensive death traps didn’t exactly help. By the time he reached his apartment he could barely drag himself upstairs. There were four flights of stairs. The old building had no elevator.

After the Randolph mansion, his two rooms and kitchenette should have looked grubby and plebeian, but Michael heaved an involuntary sigh of pleasure at the sight of his worn rugs and tattered upholstery. His desk was overflowing with unfinished work. He had left the dishes in the sink. Even so, the place felt warm and cozy compared to the atmosphere of the big handsome house in the country.

He selected two cans, more or less at random, from the collection on the kitchen shelves, and started to heat up the contents. Napoleon had been and gone; his dish on the floor was empty, but he was nowhere in sight. The kitchen window was open its usual three inches. It still amazed Michael that a cat the size of Napoleon, the scarred, muscled terror of the alleys, could get through an opening that narrow, but he had seen him do it often enough, sometimes with the speed and accuracy of a rocket.

Once he had tried shutting Napoleon in the apartment while he was away for the weekend. Napoleon had expressed his opinion of that with his usual economy of effort; he had left neat piles of the said opinions every few feet down the hall, through the living room, culminating, in the most impressive pile of all, in the center of Michael’s unmade bed. Michael hadn’t even bothered to speak to him about it. He was only grateful to Napoleon for skipping his desk. After that he left the window slightly open and took his chances with burglars. A closed window wouldn’t deter anyone who really wanted to get in. There wasn’t anything in the place worth stealing anyhow.

When the soup was hot, he carried the pan into the living room and sat down, putting his feet up on the coffee table, which bore the marks of other such moments of relaxation. He ate out of the pan, remembering, with a wry smile, the smooth, unobtrusive service of the breakfast he had eaten that morning, complete with butler and antique silver chafing dishes. Then his smile faded into an even wrier frown, as the thoughts he had successfully avoided all day forced their way into his consciousness.

Gordon Randolph had excelled at half a dozen different careers. Michael wondered why he had never gone on the stage. He had an actor’s instinct for a good, punchy line of dialogue.

Then Michael shook his head, as his habitual sense of fairness reproached him. Gordon didn’t have to dramatize the situation. It was theatrical enough. And he, Michael, had provoked that simple, shocking punch line. He had more or less set it up. Nobody could resist a line like that one.

“Six months ago she tried to kill me.”

The man has guts, Michael thought. He’s still there-not only in the same house, but right in the next room.

Gordon’s description of that incredible event hadn’t been theatrical at all; if anything, it had been understated. But Michael’s writer’s imagination had not required any details. He could picture it only too vividly: to wake from a sound sleep to see, standing over you, a figure out of a nightmare-or out of a Greek tragedy, a figure with the terrifying beauty and malignancy of Medea, arm upraised, knife poised to strike-and to know that the would-be killer was your own adored wife… No wonder primitive people had believed in demoniacal possession.

Because he had the muscles of an athlete and the quickness of a cat, Randolph had survived the encounter, but he still bore the mark of it, a long, puckered scar along his forearm. Michael’s insistent imagination presented him with another picture that was even worse than the first. To wrestle for your very life with some Thing that had the cunning and strength of the insane, and yet the familiar soft body of the woman you loved; held back by fear of hurting the beloved, but knowing that if you failed to hold her, the Other would have your life. Demoniac possession? God, yes, surely that was how you would think of it, despite the centuries of rational skepticism that had supposedly killed that superstition.

The soup on the bottom of the pan was scorched. Michael’s food always was; he cooked everything at top heat. He ate absently, without noticing the taste. There was a bad taste in his mouth anyhow. That house-that sick, evil house…

He paused, the spoon dripping unnoticed onto his knee, as his mind grappled with this new and absorbing notion. Evil. Now why had he thought of that word? It was a concept he avoided because it was at once too simple and too complex-meaningless, he would have said once. And yet, during that whole weekend, the word had come up again and again. They had all used it, talked about it.

A thud and then a clatter came from the dark kitchen, and Michael jumped and swore as he noticed the puddle of soup on his trouser leg. He put the spoon back into the pan and swabbed ineffectually at the spot with his hand. That only made it worse. Then he looked up, glaring, as the pad of heavy paws announced the arrival of Napoleon.

The cat stood in the doorway, returning Michael’s glare with interest. He was an enormous animal, as big as a small dog, and uglier than any dog Michael had ever met. His ancestry must have included cats of every color, for his fur was a hideous blend of every hue permitted to felines-orange, black, brown, white, gray, yellow, in incoherent patches. Now he looked leprous, having lost a good deal of fur in his encounters with other tomcats. One ear was pretty well gone, and a scar on one side of his whiskered countenance had fixed his jaws into a permanent maniacal grin. From the glow in his yellow eyes, Michael deduced that he had just returned from another victory. After a moment, Napoleon nodded to himself, sat down, lifted his back leg into an impossible position, and began licking his flank.

“Don’t bleed on the rug,” Michael said automatically.

Napoleon looked up from his first aid, gave Michael a contemptuous stare, and returned to his labors. Michael returned to his thoughts, which were considerably less pleasant than Napoleon’s.

Homicidal mania. They didn’t call it that nowadays, did they? Paranoia? Schizophrenia? He shook his head disgustedly. Gordon was right: words, words, words. They meant nothing to a man whose wife had tried to kill him.

Evil. Another word, but it was a word rooted deep in human experience; it satisfied the demand for understanding more than did the artificial composites of a new discipline. It had the solid backing of centuries of emotional connotations. It brought back references from every literary source from Holy Writ to Fu Manchu. Out of this accumulation of literary and racial memory, one quotation came to Michael’s mind:

By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something evil this way comes.

Nobody ever expressed an idea quite as aptly as Shakespeare. But in this case the evil was not approaching. It was already there-in that house.

Napoleon finished his ablutions and stalked over to lean heavily on Michael’s leg. It was his only means of expressing an emotion, which Michael, in his softer moments, liked to interpret as affection. Someone had once said of that hard-bitten monarch, Henry VII, that he was not, to put it mildly, uxorious. In the same vein of irony one might say of Napoleon that he was not a lap cat. He did lean, occasionally, and his weight being what it was, the effect was noticeable. Michael got up with a weary sigh and extracted a can of cat food from the supply on the shelf. Affection? Gluttony, rather. Napoleon applied himself to supper with uncouth gulps, and Michael wandered back to the couch.