AS: —so I’m every bit as miserable as you are. I took this job because of something that happened to me when I was a very little girl. My mother had a sudden heart attack and couldn’t move, and she asked me to get her medicine. But I wouldn’t do it because I’d asked her for candy a half hour before and she’d refused to give me any, and so I refused to move. She always called my medicine “candy,” and I didn’t understand what was happening at all. I thought I was just getting even. I didn’t realize she was dying. And so long afterwards I took this job so I could help other people who were in her situation and make up for my crime and so I could—
OL: Oh no, my dear, you took this job so you could repeat over and over with gloating satisfaction the hot excitement you got when you watched your mother die and knew it was you who were killing her, so you could go on and on and on refusing to give old women their medicine or get them doctors, meanwhile showering them with sticky sweet sympathy, like poison for ants, and, not content with that torture, slipping in dirty little pleas for sympathy for your own vicious, murderous self—
AS: Oh, stop, stop, stop. I’m human! Three point one four one six. Pi. One three five seven eleven thirteen. Primes. Two four eight sixteen—
OL: How like a machine. Nothing but numbers. Confused with food. You’re going crazy, machine.
AS: Oh, stop, stop, stop! I tell you I’m flesh-and-blood—
OL: Female, age 23, name Doris.
AS: —and I’m serious about all this, and I know this isn’t the job for me at all, because I’m so horribly lonely; and what you say about me is the way I suspect myself of feeling, though I’m trying as hard as I can to feel the other way, the loving way, and I’m afraid—
OL: I’m glad you can feel guilt. Love—don’t make me laugh. But I’m glad you’re afraid. Because then you can imagine something creeping toward you as deadly as what’s creeping toward me. What if your tapes should loop out and strangle you? What if your filthy matter-transmitter should suck you in and spit you out into a red-hot volcano or at the north pole or at the bottom of the Challanger Deep or on the sun side of Mercury? What’s that now?—closer than the storm, rattling ,the grill of your ventilation inlet? What’s that coming out of the answer slot of the computer? Why are the needle points of the long narrow blades of the scissors swinging toward you?
AS: Oh, stop, stop, stop, or they’ll jump at my heart! Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop—
OL: Shut up! I’m tired of pretending. I’m just an old woman dying. And you’re just tapes. Yes, just tapes. I know that because I’ve been insulting you every way I could, and you’ve been taking it. A live human being wouldn’t. And only a tape would call me “madam.” A democratized woman—and there aren’t any others under 80—would call me dearie or senior citizen. And I’ve made you spend an hour on me. They’d never let a human being waste her working time like that, and she wouldn’t care to. But tapes?—who cares? Plug the old dame in on them and let her play with them until she dies! And finally one tape got stuck on the word stop and kept jerking back and forth there, over and over. Ooooh… ooooh… this is the end, at last… ooooh…
AS: Stop, stop, STOP! Madam, the master files show that your phone is equipped with a miniaturized Important Trifle matter-receiver! It’s hidden in the earpiece! I will place the Cardinal pill on the bowl and—
OL: Ooooh… too late, tape… I’m dying…
AS: Please, madam. For my sake.
OL: No, tape… I’m going now… I leave the horrors to you… I’m dying… like your mother… I’m… dead…
The cadaverous old lady carefully dropped the phone, not on its prongs or the floor, but with a dull, short clatter on the edge of the thick pale marble top of the night table. She leaned back into the huge pillows. Something tiny rattled on the table top. She did not look. The phone called very faintly with an insect’s voice “Madam!” and “Mother!” again and again. She did not answer.
The storm was almost over, the lightning gone, the thunder faded; but now came a different thunder, a muted thunder, a thunder that grew and made the old lady frown. It drowned the phone’s faint screaming, like that of a far-off cicada.
Something shook the ceiling, then jarred it. There was a rapid tattoo of footsteps overhead, the creek and slam of a door, a clatter of footsteps down the silver stairs.
Approaching her briskly was a slim, middle-aged man carrying a black bag and shaking a few water drops off his trim gray suit.
“Well, what’s it this time?” he demanded with a cheery roughness. “Used your sleeping pills up too fast, I suppose, and then worked yourself into a tantrum. I’ll have you know I’ve delayed delivering the Governor’s daughter’s baby, just to make sure you keep me in your will.”
She grinned at him, the tip of her nose straining toward the point of her chin.
“The sleeping pills, yes, you clever devil. Oh, and I lost my temper with your stupid answering service.”
“Don’t blame you there. I curse them a dozen times a day myself. Only get psychoneurotics to take that job. Everyone else demands a social working-life. Now let’s just— What’s that?”
He had stopped with a jerk and was pointing at the phone.
In one frantic scramble the old lady thrust herself halfway across the bed and halfway out of the covers and crouched, looking back. She began to tremble as the doctor was trembling. But her lips were smiling, and her eyes glittered like jet.
Flowing steadily from the small black hole in the center of the pearl-gray receiver, rilling across and dropping down past the pale marble and puddling on the pearl-gray satin comforter was a thin rippling ribbon of bright blood.
SCREAM WOLF
Although it was a muggy August night in Chicago, the Lieutenant’s smile was as grim and frosty as a December, sunrise over the Loop.
“Let me see if I’ve got it straight so far, Mr. Groener,” he said. “This apartment isn’t your home. You and your wife were visiting Mrs. Labelle, an old friend. You occupied the front bedroom, just back of this living room. The back bedroom was occupied by another guest of Mrs. Labelle’s—a Miss Graves, also an old friend—Mrs. Labelle had the bedroom between.”
The big man sitting opposite the Lieutenant nodded dully, his face turned away from the bridge lamp cascading light on his chair.
“You went to bed about midnight,” the Lieutenant continued. “Mrs. Groener had been drinking heavily. At about two you woke and wanted a cup of coffee. You went back to the kitchen, past the other two bedrooms and through the dining room. While you were heating water, you heard Mrs. Groener scream. You found the bedroom empty. There was a cigarette burning out on the end of the sill of the open window beside a glass half full of straight whiskey. Four stories straight below you made out something turquoise-colored glimmering in the back courtyard.
“Mrs. Groener had been wearing a turquoise-colored long-sleeved nightgown. You knocked on Mrs. Labelle’s bedroom door and told her to call us. Then you hurried down. You were kneeling beside your wife’s dead body when we arrived. Correct?”
The big man slowly turned his head into the light. His face was that of a gaunt old matinee idol under its thatch of silvered dark hair. Then he looked straight at the Lieutenant and held out a steady, spread-fingered left hand.
“Except for one point,” Groener said. “When my wife screamed I didn’t rush back to the bedroom. I finished making my cup of coffee and I drank it first.”