Thorn Page 27
“Then … I kind of conked out on a sofa for a while. When I woke up this girl, Helen, was sitting there and she started talking to me. Also there was a woman in the house, and a man, an old guy, real huge. I don’t know if he was her Uncle Del that you mentioned, or her father, or who.”
“You never saw him before, huh?” He peeled off his mask. “How about me?”
The kid was immediately struck blank and hopeless. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t always remember things too good.”
“That’s fine. Outta sight. Some things you’re not supposed to remember. But when I ask you to remember something, you make a special effort, huh?”
“Sure. Anything you say.”
“Now do you know who that big old man was?”
“No. I don’t. Really.”
“Okay. And the girl you started out looking for was Annie Chapman.”
“Yeah, but they all swore she wasn’t there and they didn’t know her. You know her? She looks quite a bit like Helen.”
Yeah, there had been a good resemblance. Gliddon pondered. Sisters, somehow? Nothing seemed to quite make sense. And this kid didn’t seem to recall that orgy night at Phoenix at all. Gliddon himself had picked up both Pat and Annie on that night, one at a bus station, one on the road—recruiting for parties had been part of his job for Delaunay. Another part had been joining in—Del liked to have a physically able and trusted employee on hand in case things got rowdy, as they often did. That night the group had included Helen, Pat, Annie Chapman—and what’s-his-name, that muscular young drifter who had followed Annie when she danced off into the museum room, and had been killed by her there. Gliddon could see it yet: the strong, naked young male swinging the silver artifact, some kind of model ship, right for Annie’s head; and Annie dodging and reaching up somehow out of her crouch, grabbing her assailant by wrist and ankle, and—and just tipping him somehow, so that his long-haired head smashed on a marble base, and blood sprayed on the white carpet. Gliddon had seen a few fights in his time, but never before a stunt like that.
And from that moment, Del had made Annie his special project; he had wanted something special from her, obviously. And Gliddon, looking back, couldn’t be sure that the special something had really had anything to do with sex. Gliddon had seen very little of her from that night on…
And then, on the night of the engineered kidnapping, it must have been Annie Chapman, running in panic through the upstairs hall of the same mansion, who wouldn’t stop when she was yelled at and so had caught a charge of buckshot in the head. Del must have known who the dead girl was; but he had said nothing to Gliddon; and the family had identified the dead girl as Helen, and had cremated her.
Why?
Something to do with inheritance, with wills, with who gets what. Gliddon didn’t understand all the legal angles of what happened when someone as wealthy as Del died or supposedly died. Del wanted to be thought dead, to disappear, while in fact retaining control over most of his own great riches. Gliddon could understand that; he was trying to do something like it himself. But he was more and more convinced that something else important was being planned by Del, and Gliddon hadn’t been dealt in. Except, maybe, in some way, he was going to be set up to take a fall.
Damn the whole Seabright crew, anyway. They were trying something that Gliddon wasn’t going to like when he found out about it. The way things were looking, more and more, they pretty well had to be.
The boy still sat on the floor, looking up at Gliddon, growing more and more frightened; he looked sick. “Listen,” he pleaded now, “I gotta go to the toilet. Please.”
“Okay,” said Gliddon. He turned away and stuck his head out of the door of the cell. Suddenly he found himself feeling and thinking like a jailor, and it was amusing. “Ike? You got a client here. Take him for a walk and bring him back. I want to talk to him some more, later.”
* * *
Judy could hear, down at the other end of the strange little hallway, the voices murmuring, sometimes rising a little in anger or in fear. The implacable man who had made them all prisoners, whose name apparently was Gliddon as the girl called Helen had said, seemed to be making his rounds like a doctor in a busy clinic, going from one treatment room to the next.
At least none of the patients were screaming. Yet.
Judy, to control her own fear, concentrated as much as possible on something else—on that hurrying approach that only she could sense. He was coming, in an onrush that seemed utterly tireless. The difficulty remained, though, that Judy could not tell how far he had yet to come. With a great effort she tried to communicate her own fear and need to the one approaching, and after a while it seemed to Judy that his speed had become greater still. But no words, no plans could be exchanged, and she could not be sure. The landscape around him was still all wild and empty, she could perceive that much … but where were his running feet? Abruptly Judy realized that he was now wingborne.
A bright light against her closed lids startled her. She squinted open her eyes to see Gliddon, now without his mask, looking down at her over a small lantern. His face was more ordinary than she had imagined it. In one hand he carried a casual, half-smoked cigarette.
His voice was not unkindly. It might even fit the doctor she had imagined. “Let’s see, your name is Judy Southerland, as I recall from your ID.”
“That’s right.” Her own voice came out pleasingly strong. “I think you’d better untie my hands.”
“Now just try to have a little patience, Judy. I didn’t ask you to come here, you know. What are you people doing here, anyway?”
“I … any answer I give to that is going to sound pretty silly.”
“Try the true one on me. That’ll save time and trouble.”
“I—no, I don’t have to tell you anything at all. Except that you’d better let me go. Help is going to be coming for me.”
The man set down his lantern carefully on the floor. Then without changing expression he drew back his arm and hit Judy open-handed across the face. Never in her whole life before had she been struck like that. Now she understood what was meant by the old expression about seeing stars. A moment later she tasted blood. And her tongue had become an odd, paralyzed lump that in a moment was going to hurt badly. It started to hurt.
She tried moving her jaw, and was a little surprised to find that it still worked. Then, speaking carefully around her tongue, she said: “You’re going to be sorry you did that. Oh God are you ever going to be sorry.”
Perhaps her sincerity made a momentary impression on the man, for he seemed to hesitate. Then he took a puff on his cigarette, and reached out to grab Judy by the hair. She saw what was coming, and uttered a little shriek. “All right! All right, I’ll tell you the truth, if that’s what you want. Don’t blame me if it sounds completely crazy.”
Her hair was released. “I’m listening.”
“I just talked Bill into giving me a ride. Then we ran into these other two by accident. I have no idea what they were doing out this way. But our car was already stuck down there when they came along.”
“I see. It was your idea for Bill to drive you out here.”
“Yes.”
“Why? You just like to take rides in the middle of the night? On roads like that one? If you just want a peaceful place to screw, you don’t have to drive out of town this far.”
Judy was silent. A hand rested on her head, and here came the cigarette again, toward her face. She yelped. “Wait! I’m going to the Astoria School, you see. Up in the hills on the other side of Santa Fe.”
The approaching fire paused. “That’s nice, tell me more.” Judy could feel in the man’s hand on her head that he was enjoying this.
“It has a bearing. Wait. Well … one of the girls there was saying that her brother had been out this way recently, deer hunting, and there were some people living here in the old buildings.” Judy stalled there. Invention had flagged, because of the way Gliddon was looking at her.
“You know what I think I’m going to do?” he said at last. “That young guy who gave you the ride, as you say. I haven’t talked to him yet. I think I’ll bring him in here and talk to him. As soon as either one of you tells me another funny story, I’ll pop out one of his eyes. I have a way of doing it with my thumb, just like this.” Gliddon demonstrated in mid-air. “Then we can talk some more about deer hunting in the spring, and I’ll take out the other. I’ll use him up a little at a time—”
“All right, all right! We know about the painting. I mean I know about it. Bill doesn’t know a thing.”
Her interrogator sighed. It was an angry sound, but Judy realized, slowly and with fearful relief, that the anger this time was not at her. Gliddon stared at the adobe wall for a time, as if he were looking into the distance. Then his attention came back to her. “You were all at one of Del’s parties tonight, right?”
Judy nodded agreement. She had no real idea of what she was agreeing to, only that agreement was the expected answer, the believable answer, the answer that would at least postpone more pain.
“I thought so. At Ellison’s house in Santa Fe?”
Judy read the question as well as she could, and nodded her head again.
“Yeah, I thought so. And for once the old asshole got stoned himself and talked too much. One time when I wasn’t there to look out for him. How many other people were there, besides you four that I’ve got?”
Judy paused. Thought, hoped, prayed. “No one.”
“You know what I think? I think you’re lying to me again.”
“No. No I’m not. No.”
Gliddon sighed faintly. Basically he believed Judy. Hurting girls was something that he enjoyed very much, but right now he had one more person to talk to. First, though, he meant to take a short break and grab something to eat.
* * *
For Pat, being left alone with his imagination under present circumstances was almost as bad as being worked over. Almost. He had been worked over seriously a time or two in his life, and he understood how lucky he had been to survive those occasions without permanent damage. He feared that this time he was not going to survive at all. When the man called Ike had taken him out of his cell, Pat had feared that he was going to be killed at once. Then when that hadn’t happened, he considered trying to seduce Ike. But in Pat’s experience in rough situations such efforts only tended to make things worse.
Back in his cell, crouched shivering again in his adobe corner, he could imagine the worst of everything that was going to happen to him. He almost welcomed the shivering that shook him and made his teeth chatter. Maybe if he was lucky he would freeze to death before Gliddon got around to him again.
To Pat it seemed now that he had always known that he was going to end something like this. There had never been any use in hoping for some other outcome. Life as he had known it had been basically like this all along. A few bright intervals here and there. But he seemed to have spent an awfully high percentage of his lifetime alone in the dark.
But this time he wasn’t left alone in the dark for long.
After the glare of first Gliddon’s lantern and then Ike’s, it was hard to see anything in the dim cell. But as soon as Pat’s eyes became accustomed to the gloom again he could see, or thought he could see, someone standing just inside his door.
He could have sworn the door hadn’t been opened again, but … and then he saw that it was Helen. Her hands were free, and she was looking at Pat gleefully, like some small girl triumphant in a game of hide and seek. Pat knew a relief so great that it made him feel for a moment as if he were going to faint.
Helen put a finger to her lips—as if Pat might need any warning to keep silent. Then with an impish smile she stepped close to him and squatted down. “I fooled them,” she whispered. “They thought I was sad because I was crying.”
Pat wanted her to get to work at once on his bound hands. But she just squatted there. She added: “They’re going to be mad—I already set Bill loose.” She continued to look at Pat fondly, as Annie had used to do sometimes. But Helen was doing nothing helpful.
“Helen,” Pat pleaded at last, in quiet desperation. “Help me get loose.”
“In a little while. I want to kiss you, first.”
“Not now, not—”
She was leaning toward him, and now her lips stopped his. Her lips—Helen’s lips?—felt cool. In another moment Pat had recognized their touch, even before they left his mouth and moved down toward his throat.
“Annie.” His own whisper was still very soft. But it carried the astonishment of a shout.
“Hush, lover, hush,” the girl murmured against Pat’s neck. Her brown hair brushed his face. Only Annie had ever really bitten him in making love. And now he felt her teeth again.
It wasn’t pain. But as he had known it with Annie a dozen times before, it had the intensity of great pain. Never, with anyone else, anything like this … it went beyond, unimaginably beyond, anything that he had known of sex.
Pat moaned. He couldn’t help it if the sound was loud. He forgot his bound hands and even the threat of death. He couldn’t tell how long it went on. He never could. He knew only that at last it ended, and that the moment Annie took her mouth from his throat and let him go the shivering came back, even stronger than before. Pat felt he wasn’t going to be able to go on living in this condition. Something was going to have to happen soon to end it, one way or another. He felt so weak now that he wondered if he was dying. But the idea conveyed no fear.
He was miserable, colder than ever, very weak, but no longer afraid as he slumped back again in the angle of the wall. The adobe behind his back felt soft and crumbly. “Annie, don’t leave me.” As long as she stayed with him, he wasn’t even going to worry about how she had managed for a time to look so much like Helen.
“You can call me Annie,” her soft voice answered. “For you to is all right.” She was standing up straight again, in the middle of the little cell, and despite the darkness Pat could see her a little better than before. “Poor Pat. You don’t look good. But it’s going to be all right, Annie knows what to do for you.”
“Annie.”
“Or you could call me Helen. I was Helen once before … a long time ago.”
With crossed arms she grasped her loose pullover shirt at the waist. In a quick motion she slid it up and off over her head. Her upper body, completely uncovered, was slender and pale in the darkness.
“Annie … help me … get me out of here.”
“Don’t faint now, Pat. Don’t, my lover. Here.” And what the pale girl in the darkness was doing now seemed very strange; even Annie had never done anything quite like this before. With her left hand she cupped and lifted one of her small breasts, and with the nail of her right forefinger she drew a line just underneath. A short dark line appeared on the pale skin. Annie was bending over Pat, bringing the dark line closer and closer to his face. “Here, lover. This’ll help. This’ll help a lot.”
He understood now what was expected of him. In a moment it no longer seemed strange at all, and his lips parted, hungrily.
A little later, when the shotgun fired at the other end of the building, Pat didn’t hear a sound.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Gunfire and uproar brought Gliddon running, cursing through the fragments of sandwich that he spat out of his mouth, grabbing up his shotgun from where he had left it leaning against the stacked crates of food. At the far end of the building, Ralph reported to him that the prisoner as yet unquestioned, Bill Bird, had somehow got loose. Ike had seen him, with unbound hands, sneaking out a door and then making a break for it. Ike had fired at him, evidently missing completely; and then Ike had gone in hot pursuit.
“Get him!” Gl
iddon snarled, shoving Ralph toward the door also. “He could maybe try something like doubling back, to get the Jeep—”
“I hope to hell he does. Get him!” And Ralph ran.
Gliddon drew a deep breath, let it out. Well, all right. He had pretty well made up his mind anyway that he was going to have to cut out alone, and probably tonight, sometime before dawn. So anything that got Ike and Ralph out of the way, kept them from raising any objections, might well turn out at this stage to be an actual advantage.
He trotted toward the shed where the aircraft was kept, at the other end of the building from the Jeep. Should he stop on the way and finish off the people left in the cells? No, first things first; it looked like there was a good chance of one witness getting away anyway. First make sure of the painting and the plane.
He reached the aircraft shed, which was attached to the north end of the building. He, Ike and Ralph had built it carefully out of old lumber so it wouldn’t look strange from the air. Now at once Gliddon dragged open the wide doors. In the moonless night the section of abandoned road which served as runway was vaguely visible. Lantern still in hand—now was no time to worry about showing a little light—Gliddon then turned back toward the deep end of the hangar-shed, where he had stashed the packaged painting in the middle of a stack of rotted lumber, studded here and there with rusty nails.
And as soon as he had turned, he stopped. In the beam of his lantern stood the slim young girl, Helen, bending over the pile of old boards and timbers. Her hands were free, and now she was down to wearing nothing but her jeans.
“God,” said Gliddon, speaking aloud but to himself. “They’re all loose.” And any one of them could finger him for kidnapping, at least.
“Don’t you point that gun at me,” the girl said, straightening up and turning, a hand on one hip. She put her other hand on a flimsy table that Gliddon had brought into the shed when they were doing some maintenance on the aircraft engine, as a place to set down tools and parts.