Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

Was she panting also, like a fighter between rounds? If I went again now, would she be able to attack again so soon? I knew I wouldn’t try. The pain had been too real.

I looked at my watch then and nearly fell down again. An hour and a half? I held it to my ear, and shook it hard. An hour and a half! Shakily I called Weill’s office and told Hendrickson that he could have the machine tool picked up any time. I was going home.

There wasn’t much else there, nothing that I couldn’t get to the car alone. And by five I was on the highway. An hour and a half, I kept thinking. Where? Doing what?

She would kill me, I thought over and over. Just like she killed her husband. The notebooks, I had to get them myself. I couldn’t let Lenny take them away. Rudeman must have discovered too late that she had power too. But he must have suspected before the end. His psychosis. The new code, afraid she had learned the old one. He must have learned about this. He had kept her ten years before she killed him. It would be in the notebooks. I drove too fast, and got home in six hours. And not until the car squealed to a stop in the driveway did I even think about what I would tell Lenny or Janet. But I didn’t have to tell her anything. She took one look at my face and cried, “Oh, my God!” And she pulled me from the car and got me inside and into bed somehow, without any help from me, but without hindrance either. And I fell asleep.

I woke up when Janet did to get the kids off to school. “Are you better? I called Dr. Lessing last night, and he said to bring you in this morning.”

“I’m better,” I said wearily. I felt like I was coming out of a long drugged sleep, with memories hazy and incomplete. “I need to sleep and have orange juice, and that’s about it. No need for you to stay home.” She said she’d see about that, and she went out to get Rusty up, and to find Laura’s red scarf. I hadn’t seen them for almost a week, hadn’t even thought of them. They would expect presents. They always expected presents. When Janet came back in fifteen minutes, I convinced her that I really was all right, and finally she agreed to go on to work. She’d call at noon.

I had breakfast. I showered and dressed. And smoked three cigarettes. And convinced myself that I wasn’t sick at all. And then I walked over to Christine’s house.

Lenny met me at the door. “What the hell are you doing up and out? Janet said you came in sick as a dog last night.” He gave me more coffee. At the kitchen table.

“I kept thinking about what you were saying about her.” I indicated the rest of the house. “And I was sick, feverish, and decided I couldn’t do anything else in Chicago. So I came home. Anything I can do to help?”

Lenny looked like he wanted to hug me, but he said merely, “Yeah, I can use some help.”

“Tell me what to do.”

“Just stick around until Chris wakes up. I gave her a sleeping pill last night. Should be wearing off soon. What I’ve been doing is going down the notebooks line by line and every time he used another book for his key, Chris visualizes the shelf and finds it there. Then we find that book in the boxes. And I go on to the next one. While she rests, or is busy with her work, I find the key words in the books and decode a line or two to make sure. Rather not lug that whole library with us if I can avoid it.”

I was watching him as if he were a stranger. I was thinking of him as a stranger. I had no definite plan worked out, just a direction. She had to get rid of him. Before he learned any more from the notebooks.

And her. What did she know? I knew I had to find out without any more delay. I tried to reach her and found a cottony foggy world. The sleeping pill. I tried to jar her awake, and got glimpses of a nightmare world of grey concrete expanses. A hall, the grey of the floor exactly matched the grey of the walls and ceiling. The joints lost their squareness ahead of me, and the hallway became a tube that grew narrower and narrower and finally was only a point. I was running toward the point at a breakneck speed.

You’re not Karl! Who are you ? I pulled out. What if she brought the pain again? The pseudo heart attack? I was shaking.

“Jesus, Eddie, you should be in bed.” Lenny put his hand on my forehead. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”

I shook my head. “I’m okay. Just get a chill now and then. How about the couch here? At least I’ll be handy when she gets up.”

He installed me in the study on the deep green couch, with an Indian throw over me. I drifted pleasantly for a while. Then, Get out! Who are you ?— I’ll never get out again. Karl knew, didn’t he? I’ll finish what he started. You can’t hurt me the way you hurt him. I’m too strong for you. We’ll go away, you and me . I laughed, and laughing pulled away. At the same instant I heard her scream.

I sat up and waited. Lenny brought her down in a few minutes. I didn’t join them in the kitchen. I watched and listened through her, and she was so agitated now that she wasn’t even aware of my presence. I was getting that good at it.

“Listen, Lenny, and then leave me alone. I thought it was Karl, but it isn’t. I don’t know who it is. He can get inside my mind. I don’t know how. I know he’s there, and he makes me do things, crazy things. He’ll use me, just like Karl did all those years. I can’t help myself. And night after night, day after day, whatever he wants me to do, wherever he wants me to go…” She was weeping and her talk was beginning to break up into incoherent snatches of half-formed thoughts.

“Chris! Stop that! Your husband was crazy! He thought he could possess you. That’s insane! And he half convinced you that he could do it. But God damn it, he’s dead! No one else can touch you. I won’t let anyone near you.”

“He doesn’t have to be near me. All these weeks… He’s been in and out, watching, listening to us go over the notebooks. He knows what’s in them now. I… He won’t stop now. And if he says I have to go with him, I’ll have to.”

Her voice went curiously flat and lifeless. She was seeing again that tube that ended in a point, and suddenly she longed to be on it, heading toward that point. “I’d rather die now,” she said.

Lenny’s big face twisted with pain. “Chris, please, trust me. I won’t let anyone near you. I promise. Let me help you, Chris. Please. Don’t force me out now.”

“It won’t make any difference. You don’t understand. If he makes me go with him, I can’t fight it.”

But she could. I didn’t know if my thoughts reminded her of the heart attack, or if she would have thought of it herself. Karl sitting in her room, watching her with a smile on his face. “You will turn them down, of course, my dear. You can’t travel to Africa alone.”

“No, I won’t turn them down! I want to take this assignment…” Slipping, blurring images, fear of being alone, of not being able to keep the world in focus. Fear of falling through the universe, to a time where there was nothing, falling forever… Staring at the rejection of the offer in her own handwriting. Karl’s face, sad, but determined.

“You really don’t want to travel without me, my dear. It wouldn’t be safe for you, you know.”

And later, waking up from dreamless sleep. Knowing she had to get up, to go down the hall to his room, where he was waiting for her. No! It’s over! Leave me alone . Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, standing up, NO! I HATE YOU! Your soft fat hands! You make me feel dirty! Why don’t you die! Have a heart attack and die .

Fighting it to the door, dragging herself unwillingly to the door, fighting against the impulse, despising him and even more herself. He was forcing her up flights of stairs, without rails, straight down for miles and miles, and he was at her side, forcing each step. She pushed him, and he screamed. Then he was there again, and she pushed again. And again. Then he was running, and she, clinging to the doorknob in her bedroom, she was running too, pushing him off the steps as fast as he managed to climb back on, and he stumbled and fell and now she knew he would fall forever, even as she fell sometimes. Swirling into darkness with pain and terror for company. She slipped to the floor, and awakened there much later knowing only that something was gone from her life. That she felt curiously free and empty and unafraid.