They were rather widely split in their opinions. Tom Burns thought there would be a season, but he guessed the opening would be postponed, maybe a week. Will Henley thought, loudly, that there wouldn’t be a season, that once this thing was settled most of them would want nothing more but to get away from this part of the country as quick as possible, so there wouldn’t be the personnel to put on any plays. Ken Forrest stated with characteristic quiet that he thought the show would go on, but offered no amplification. Rod McGee said he for one was willing to stay if Haldemann decided to go ahead, but he wasn’t so sure Haldemann would want to; Haldemann seemed like a pretty sensitive guy, and he might decide it wasn’t in good taste to go ahead and put on plays.
Mel had no strong opinion one way or the other yet, so he said nothing. He was, in fact, thinking of something else entirely. For the first time, the idea had become real to him that the killer was very possibly one of the people in the company, maybe even one of the people at this table. He looked at them with this new realization, studying their faces, trying to decide if one of those faces was a mask hiding a murderer.
Tom Burns? The man was obviously a heavy drinker, you could tell from looking at him. He had a careless attitude toward life in general. Could the killing of Cissie Walker have been prompted by alcohol? Had Tom Burns, drunk, tried to force himself on her, been rebuffed, and had he in a drunken rage killed her?
Or Will Henley. He was the biggest and strongest of any of them there; he could most easily have beaten and strangled the girl without giving her a chance to run away or scream for help. And he’d been praising the killer’s cleverness; was that simply arrogance? Was he himself the “clever” killer, mocking them?
Or Ken Forrest. Silent, withdrawn, oddly unemphatic. Couldn’t the killer be one of those people who bottles up his emotions, who holds everything in with no safety valve, and who suddenly blows up all at once?
Or Rod McGee. Eager, friendly, agreeable. Another protective cover for a darker person underneath?
The subject of the summer season exhausted, they went on to anecdotes, telling each other half-truths about their past experiences in theater and the Army and school, and Mel left his morbid reflections alone for a while. He told an exaggerated version of an encounter he’d had with a WAF while touring with an Army Special Services show, and as the talk went on he began to lose the dullness of shock that had been with him since he’d walked into the dead girl’s room this afternoon. His normal ebullience returned, and when he managed in the middle of an out-and-out falsehood about a girl guitar player from Queens to let everybody know he was Jewish, he knew wryly he was his old self again.
Gradually, the group was getting more and more animated. They’d all been needing a change of pace, something to break the spell that murder had cast over them, and this was it. From reminiscence they got to the joke-telling period, and not a single clean joke was heard. They were all laughing so hard, and interrupting each other so often, that even the dirty jokes weren’t heard any too clearly. In the general hilarity — touched just slightly as it was with hysteria — Will Henley thawed and became absolutely amiable, Ken Forrest came way out of his shell and demonstrated a piercing laugh that endangered every wineglass in the place, and Rod McGee settled in with the group and stopped looking as though any second he would dash off and shine a lot of shoes. As for Tom Burns, his eyes got brighter and brighter, his nose got redder and redder, and his speech got shlurrier and shlurrier.
They finally left the Lounge at one-fifteen, only because the bartender insisted. Tom Burns tried to exit with a quote from Shakespeare, but whether he succeeded or not he alone knew; by now his speech was almost entirely unintelligible.
Will Henley started the singing, as they moved out across the night away from the Lounge. “On top of Old Smoky,” he shouted, and they all joined in. Mel took upon himself the job of caller, roaring out the lines before they were sung by everyone else, and wishing he could remember that old Stan Freberg parody so he could shout out some of Freberg’s lines.
They angled across the road, weaving and singing, all linked together with their arms around each other’s shoulders and waists. Lights flicked on in the house bulking ahead of them, and heads appeared in windows, but they ignored it all. They needed release, the one killer and the four unwilling sharers of his drama; what did they care about disapproving heads in lit windows? They were lit themselves, and to hell with everything.
It was Rod McGee who shushed them all when they reached the porch. From loud caterwauling they shifted immediately to comic silence, tiptoeing into the house, giggling, shushing one another, tripping on the stairs. Alden March met them at the second-floor landing, pique on his face and hands on his hips. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,” he told them, in a loud whisper. “At a time like this!”
They hooted him down, and staggered on by. Mel and Rod and Will had to climb the additional flight to the third floor, where they whispered incoherent good nights to one another. Mel unlocked his door with not too much difficulty, switched on the light, and entered his room. He closed the door, peeled off his clothing, scattered it around the room, switched off the light, and crawled into bed.
Three minutes later, with embarrassed haste, he got up again to relock the door.
The madman lay frightened and exultant in the darkness, squeezing his hands together and smiling from ear to ear. His room was much like Mel Daniels’, and like it now was in darkness. The door was closed, but unlocked, for of them all the madman had the least to fear tonight, and a sliver of light outlined the door all the way around.
Of them all he had the least to fear, but he too was afraid, and afraid of the same thing as all the rest. He was afraid of the madman, of himself. Exultant, but also afraid.
Exultant, because tonight he had brought it off. The acid test, the acid test. Sitting with them all, joining in their conversation, without suspicion. But also afraid, because in his success he had lost himself, and now more than ever before that was dangerous.
It had happened to him other times, when he was fooling Doctor Chax by making believe he was one of the other inmates. Sometimes it had happened that in the making-believe he had lost touch with himself, the true self and the assumed self had become confused together, and for a while he had not been in control. At such times, a tiny portion of himself — he visualized it as crouching low against the floor in a dark corner — only that tiny portion of himself was still aware, could still differentiate between fantasy and reality, while the rest of him was all taken over by the other being. Times when all but that tiny portion of himself actually believed he was that other being. It hadn’t happened often, and it never lasted long, so he had never been overly concerned about it.
But tonight he was concerned. In the asylum it had not been dangerous, but here it was dangerous indeed. Here he had to be in control, at all times. When it had happened tonight, at the table in Black Lake Lounge, the sliver of self that had retained awareness was terrified, afraid that the other being would make a slip, would say the wrong thing and spoil every thing.
But it had worked out, with no danger and no trouble, and so the fear was muted by exultance. They had accepted him. They had made no objection to his joining their group, being a part of their conversation and their laughter and their singing.