Barbara Michaels - The Dark on the Other Side

Linda gaped at it in vague surprise. Had she really finished the whole bottle? Surely this one had been almost full when she took it out of the drawer.

She shoved it aside with her foot, wrinkling her nose at the sour reek of spilled liquor. Her tweed skirt was twisted and her right stocking marred by a run. There were stains on the front of her blouse.

“Run my bath,” she called, tugging at the zipper of the skirt.

Anna appeared in the doorway.

“But, madam, it’s late-”

“Whose fault is that?” Linda asked pettishly. “Oh, for God’s sake, I’ll make it a shower then. Get my clothes out. The black culotte thing, stockings, the gold sandals-and hurry up, damn you.”

She moved toward the bathroom, shedding clothes as she went, watching with malicious satisfaction as Anna stooped to pick up each item. Anna grunted when she bent over. She was too fat, that was her trouble. Linda gave the right hand tap a vicious twist and stepped under a spray of water that felt as if it had been refrigerated.

The treatment was drastic, but effective; she knew, from past experience, how effective. When she came out of the bathroom, she felt fairly human again, and by the time she was seated at the dressing table, with Anna’s nimble fingers working at her hair, she was able to be cunning.

“I’m sorry I spoke to you as I did,” she said, watching Anna’s face in the mirror. “I’m always cross when I sleep in the afternoon. It was my own fault that I was late.”

The sullen pink face did not change, nor the pale eyes move from their work.

“That’s quite all right, madam,” Anna said.

So much for that. There was no use trying to influence the girl now; she knew too much.

When Linda went down, she knew that she looked as good as skilled grooming and expensive clothes could make her look. But the black outfit had not, perhaps, been a wise choice. She liked the freedom of the wide black trousers, so full that they resembled a skirt except when the wearer was in motion; but the bodice left her arms and throat bare, and seemed to show more bone than flesh. She had had to send Anna to bore a new hole in the belt, and when it was buckled tightly it gathered the dress in unbecoming folds around the waist. I’m too thin, she thought, and then: Pathos; I’m appealing to his sense of pity. Nice. And it probably won’t work, either.

The others were already assembled in the drawing room, not in the library this time. Gordon did seem to get a perverse pleasure from Andrea’s company; he loved baiting her. But he would never admit her into his sanctum.

As she went down the hall, Linda knew she was walking faster than usual, almost running. Something pulled at her like a magnet acting on a lode-stone. She had felt it that morning, sensing his presence even before she saw him. Tonight the tug was even stronger. That was all it was so far, nothing reasoned or desired, only a blind, mindless need. Like a fish on a line, she thought angrily, and shoved at the hangings over the doorway.

Andrea had already arrived. Sprawled with her usual lack of grace in an armchair near the fire, she raised a fat hand in greeting, and Linda saw her suddenly, not as the familiar friend, but as she must have appeared to a stranger, even one as tolerant and sophisticated as Michael Collins.

She was a very ugly old woman. Her ugliness was not the distinguished plainness some homely girls acquire in old age; it was plain, unvarnished, positive ugliness, strengthened by cultivated sloppiness. Her wrinkled face was overlaid with a thick coating of powder; her lipstick, applied in a wide slash without the aid of a mirror, always left smears on cigarettes and glasses. Her hair was another, clashing, shade of red, worn in a frizzy halo. Her dresses looked like the sort of thing that might be worn by a gypsy fortuneteller at a fair. Tonight, in honor of the occasion, she had added a few more yards of beads to the collection around her neck, and changed her long, full calico skirts for a magenta taffeta one of the same style. Long brass earrings dangled from her ears. In her left hand she held a jade cigarette holder.

I hate her, Linda thought. Fat, ugly old woman…

She knew a moment of despair so absolute that it felt like death. What had possessed her to ask Andrea to dinner? Some unformed idea of help, of support? But it wouldn’t work that way. Andrea’s weight would be on the other side of the scales, pushing them down, against her.

“Hello, Andrea,” she said. “I hope the trip was successful.”

“Darling girl,” Andrea said effusively. She waved the cigarette holder, endangering her mop of hair. “Yes, I was just telling the boys about it. It was nasty, but I managed.”

“A case of demonic possession,” Gordon explained solemnly. “By-Beelzebub, was it, Andrea? Or Belial?”

“Oh, you nasty skeptic,” Andrea said. She grinned at Gordon. The effect was hideous-white, unnaturally perfect teeth framed in smeary scarlet lipstick. “You know I’m never sure who it is. I just reel off a list of names and tell them all to get the hell out of the patient. It has to be one of the bunch.”

Linda glanced at Michael. His expression was just what she had expected it to be-incredulity and amusement covered by a thin glaze of polite interest.

“Andrea, you are too much,” she said irritably. “You sound like a charlatan.”

“The fakers are the ones who bother with fancy words,” said Andrea, flicking the ash off her cigarette. It landed on the Aubusson carpet, and she smeared it around with her foot. “I tell it like it is.”

“Tell me,” Michael said, leaning forward, “how do you go about exorcising an evil spirit? I know the Roman Church has a ritual for that purpose, but I don’t imagine you-”

“No, I’ve got my own methods,” Andrea said complacently. “Not that the other isn’t effective enough. But it has to be performed by an ordained priest.”

“That’s right. I’d forgotten.”

“You’ve studied the subject? Mm-hm. But you don’t believe.”

“No.”

Reading their faces, Linda leaned back with a feeling of relief. Andrea’s judgments of people were quick and violent-like or dislike, immediate and instinctive. Apparently she approved of Michael Collins. She grinned at him and he grinned back, remarking,

“At this point I’m supposed to say, ‘Not that I haven’t seen things, strange things, that were hard to explain by the normal laws of nature.’ But I can’t say that. I’ve never had the faintest flash of clairvoyance, nor seen a ghost.”

“Never had the feeling that you’d been somewhere before, done the same thing at another time?”

“Déjà vu? Of course. Everyone has had that experience. It’s easily explained in terms of subconscious resemblances, forgotten memories, without resorting to theories of precognition or reincarnation.”

“Touché,” said Gordon softly, from the depths of his chair.

Andrea turned on him with a metallic jangle of jewelry.

“Touché, hell. Skeptics always drag that one out. They have an answer for everything-if you let them throw out half the evidence. I can quote you, offhand, a dozen cases of genuine precognition. Impressions of a scene, a house, a face-recorded and witnessed-which appeared at a later time.”

It was the old familiar ground; they had been over it a dozen times, arguing in a perfectly good-humored way, which still made Linda queasy and nervous. Gordon was leading Andrea on again, not only for his own amusement but to entertain his guest. But now the conversation took an unexpected twist.

“Precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance,” Michael said. “Aren’t we wandering a bit from the track? ESP is one thing; demons are another. Or so it seems to me.”