Barbara Michaels - The Dark on the Other Side

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.

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.