Barbara Michaels - The Dark on the Other Side

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.

Michael felt sure of this hypothesis when he started the next letter and found Randolph ’s name in the opening paragraph. The context was not precisely what he had come to expect of Gordon Randolph.

“These sporadic flashes of brilliance baffle me,” his father had written of the school’s star athlete and president of the student body. “I expected great things of the boy, he’s already a school legend, but he never happened to take any of my courses until this year-which is his last. I’d say that literature simply wasn’t his field, if it weren’t for that rare outstanding essay.”

The rest was inconsequential, for Michael’s purposes. There was another reference to the devil worshipers, whose existence was now a well-established rumor. His father found them exasperating, whoever they were: “They’ve been reading about the Hellfire Club and decided to imitate that bunch of nasty-minded little-”

The next word was indecipherable; which, Michael thought, with a reminiscent grin, was probably just as well. His father’s collection of epithets and expletives were drawn from the riper Restoration dramatists; some of them had curled his hair even in his supercilious high school days.

As he read on, his sentimental nostalgia increased; but so did his bewilderment. There were eight letters in all. One of them didn’t even mention Randolph, the others contained more references to his father’s pet student-what was the kid’s name?-Al Something-than to Gordon. Poor old Dad must have been losing his grip, Michael thought. Gordon was only a few years away from his great book; according to the publisher’s blurb, parts of it had actually been written while he was in college. If his father hadn’t spotted a talent of that magnitude…

The last letter was no more informative, but it was something of a shocker. His father’s handwriting was shakier than usual, and his sentences were so garbled by emotion as to be relatively incoherent in parts. The feeble idiocy of the campus Hellfire Club had exploded into scandal and disaster; one student was dead as a result of an occult experiment, which his father’s Victorian inhibitions had kept him from describing in detail. And that student was the boy for whom he had had such hopes-Alfred Green.

Large as the affair had been in the minuscule world of the university, it hadn’t made much of a splash in the press. Michael remembered hearing something about it, but the influential board of trustees had succeeded in suppressing the details. Still, reading between the lines, it must have been a nasty business. The word was his father’s. It kept recurring, through the scribbled agitation of the lines: nasty, foul, disgusting. It would seem that way to him, Michael thought. Then, at the end of the letter, came a hasty postscript.

“Young Randolph came by this evening, to express his regrets. Alfred was one of his closest friends. It was kind of the boy, and perceptive, to know that this has hurt me worse than an ordinary scandal would have done. Perhaps I haven’t been fair to him. Antipathy is an odd thing.”

Michael sat staring at the last page for a long time, while the cigarette burned down between his lax fingers and his second cup of coffee grew cold. He felt completely deflated. He had expected a complete, startling answer to the enigma that had begun as a simple problem of character, and which had now taken on such ominous outlines. But there was no answer in these letters, only new questions. In the back of his mind the mental call still pulled, confusing what wits he had left.