Флетчер Флора - Take Me Home

The absurd faintness having passed, Henry was furious. He felt that he had been made a fool of, as though Ivy had maliciously put into his mind by telepathy the premonition of her death, and it was far too much to bear calmly at the end of a day in which he had been a fool too many times before. But the fury left him, passing only a little less quickly than the faintness, and he wondered in dismay, remembering her in his bed that morning, if she was attempting now with this stranger a kind of radical surgery that had failed with him.

Moving again, he went into the hotel lobby and saw the floor indicator above the closed elevator doors moving upon the number two. He started up the stairs three at a time, staying always a floor behind the elevator, until he found the indicator unmoving on the number six. Looking down the hall to his right, he was just in time to see a door closing.

He stood looking at the door in indecision. He assumed, from what he had seen, that Ivy had willingly admitted the man to her room. He guessed at her motive and feared the consequences of her behavior, but he had no desire, by intruding where he was not wanted, to make a fool of himself again. He was still standing and looking at the closed door, wondering if he should intrude or retreat, when Ivy cried out. It was not a loud and piercing cry. It had more of the quality of a plaintive cry of despair, rising barely above the volume of a normal voice, and he was not certain, after it was gone, that he had heard it at all.

But it was enough to make him act decisively. He went down the hall to the door and tried the knob. The door, unlocked, swung inward before pressure. Ivy, on the floor, was struggling with a man who was trying to pinion her flailing arms, and as he stood fixed in the doorway, she lifted her shame-filled eyes over the shoulders of the man and saw him standing there. Her lips formed the shape of his name, but she made no sound.

Henry, for a couple of seconds, went blind with rage. Everything was obscured by a pink mist deepening through red to black, and he stepped forward into the mist as it began to lift, striking with all his strength at the kneeling figure of the man. The man, Charles Neal, had not heard the door open behind him, but he was made aware of Henry’s presence by the direction of Ivy’s gaze and the sudden rigidity of her body. He whirled to one side, and this turning saved him from the force of Henry’s blow. Henry’s fist brushed his jaw, spinning him away and sending him sprawling. He rolled to the wall beyond the bed and came up like a cat onto his feet. In his hand as he rose, apparently by some kind of legerdemain, was a switch knife. The long blade of the knife sprang out of its handle, shining, with a snick of sound. Slowly, with a calculated deadliness of purpose that went oddly with the insane light in his shallow eyes, Charles Neal, feinting and weaving and driving in, brought the knife held low and ready with the blade angled up.

Henry’s movement was hampered by his overcoat, which weighed suddenly a thousand pounds, but it was too late now to remove it, and it was luck for him that it was, for it saved him from the shining blade. Charles Neal feinting and weaving and driving in, brought the blade upward in a short, flashing arc. Henry, falling back and aside, felt a dull blow in the belly, a hot prick of flesh above his navel. The blade caught and held for a second in the thick fabric of his coat, and his motion away from the blow pulled Neal off balance for that second. He stumbled, bent over, and Henry brought a heavy fist down like a club on the back of his neck at the base of the skull. Driven to his knees, he remained for another second in the kneeling position, and then he lay down on his face on the floor with a rattle of breath.

Henry looked down at him and drew his own breath with heavy labor.

No one, he realized, had spoken a word or made an unnecessary sound since he opened the door, and except the sound, of breathing, the room was now utterly sill.

Lifting his eyes and looking around, he saw that he was alone with the stranger at his feet. Ivy was gone.

She could never remember leaving the room or descending the stairs or crossing the lobby. She could only remember being suddenly in the street, in her torn dress, in the cutting cold. It did not occur to her that she was doing a cowardly thing in running away to leave Henry, who had looked for her and found her and come to her in time to save her, alone and unarmed against a dangerous man with a knife. It did not occur to her, as it had not previously occurred to her that it was a wicked thing to attempt suicide in his bathroom, because she was blinded to the implications and effects of her action by the one imperative need to escape the circumstances that had closed upon her. She was not, in fact, merely running away from the sordid situation in the room she had left, nor was she running from the danger. Her flight was a symbol and a gesture. She was really fleeing the aberrant and threatening part of herself that made sordidness and danger probable, if not certain.

And so she ran, holding her tom dress together and carrying the constant threat with her, from one place to another. She did not actually run, but walked very fast, and she had no idea where she was going, either immediately or eventually, except that she must, in the first place, cross over at once to the other side of the street, for the street would somehow be a barrier between her and the proximate past. When this came into her mind, she was halfway to the corner of the block, but she turned with the thought, without slowing or thinking further or seeing anything whatever, stepping off the curb between two parked cars and walking blindly and imperiously into the traffic lane. At the last moment, just before she was struck, she looked around and through the windshield of the car, as if in the instant of this new and different danger she was mysteriously compelled to see from where and what it came. She was aware of a white and staring face, set behind glass in lines of virulent hatred, and she had in that final instant, before the bolt of pain and thunderous night, the most fantastic notion that it was the face of Lila...

But it was not the face of Lila at all, and it was absolutely absurd that she had ever thought so. The face was much older than the face of Lila, and set not in lines of hatred but of reassuring and disciplined kindness, and above the face was a foolish kind of white cap that Lila would never have worn. At first sight, the face appeared to be disembodied, hanging above her without support, and this was so clearly impossible that the face itself was impossible, and she shut her eyes and waited for it to fade away, but when she opened her eyes again it was still there. Now, however, there was also a body to support the face and give it credence, but the body was incidental and unimportant; the important thing was that the face was smiling and was obviously trying to say something.

“What did you say?” Ivy said to the face.

She intended to speak normally, and tried to, but her voice came out a whisper, and she couldn’t understand why this should be so.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” the face said.

“Waiting for me? Why? Where have I been?”

“You’ve been unconscious. For quite a long time. Hew do you feel?”

Now that the question had been asked, Ivy realized that she did not feel right in several ways. In the first place, she did not understand where she was or how she had got there, and this was confusing. In the second place, apart from the confusion, she had a feeling of insecure cohesion, as though at any second she might fall into pieces. In the third place, she hurt. She hurt in her head and body, in flesh and bone, and the hurt was worse with her slightest move.